Building Soft Skills
Equipping students to thrive in personalized learning
PERSONALIZATION
STUDENTS SHIFT TO LEARNERS
How can learners be truly successful in a personalized learning environment?
Some examples of soft skills needed in PLE are perseverance, collaboration, critical thinking, motivation, organization, curiosity, diligence, and the list goes on! Check out the link below to a word cloud of core dispositions students need and use in a personalized learning environment. Feel free to add your own ideas to our word cloud!
One of the roles of the teacher in a PLE is to foster these soft skills through modeling, guiding, and creating a classroom culture that encourages and breeds these skills. Personalized learning is the ideal environment to build up students soft and hard skills simultaneously.
CLOSER LOOK AT SOFT SKILLS
Self-Directed and Driven
Questions to ask yourself: How can I help students understand their preferences, needs, and interests? How can I expose them to possibilities for accessing, engaging, and express learning? How can allowing students to drive learning enhance motivation?
Resilience and Perseverance
Questions to ask yourself: How would the learning environment be different if students showed grit? How can I model perseverance in my classroom? How can I encourage learners to persist when they are stuck? What are some strategies for perseverance we can use?
Collaboration
Questions to ask yourself: What value will collaboration play in future jobs? What other soft skills contribute to a student's ability to collaborate successfully? How can I model good collaboration? How can I join in student collaboration as a contributor and facilitator?
HOW CAN I BUILD SOFT SKILLS IN MY LEARNERS?
Goal Setting
The teacher's role as facilitator is critical here. The teacher provides continuous feedback to support students in reaching their goals and "compel them to action." According to Allison Zmuda in Learning Personalized, feedback should be regular, student-friendly, action-oriented, and allow students to be reflective. The focus of feedback is on the process and effort, not the outcome. Teacher feedback should spur on thinking (Dylan Wiliam).
Through setting goals and intentional feedback, learners will hold a growth mindset over a fixed mindset.
Genius Hour
CLASS COMMUNITY AND CULTURE
RESOURCES AND BOOKS
Learning Personalized by Allison Zmuda, Greg Curtis, and Diane Ullman
Make Learning Personal by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey
Learning by Choice by AJ Juliani
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
Mindset by Dr. Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.
personalizelearning.com by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey
Tracy Clark @TracyClark08
Learner Sketch for understanding preferences and needs
Amber L Sawyer
“It’s not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings.” Ann Launders
Email: amber.sawyer@knoxschools.org
Website: kidblog.org/MHESRockets
Location: Knoxville, TN, United States
Phone: (865) 964-9640
Twitter: @amberlsawyer