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Teaching “Soft” Skills Can Be So Hard


I recently overheard one of my Grade 8 students who had just gathered up enough courage to run for a position on the Student Council Executive say something defeatist. I redirected her, encouraging other possible things that she could have said to herself or others to express the same idea in a less self-deprecating fashion and went on with my day. I had no idea that it really had an impact beyond that moment.

The next day, I received an email asking me to call this child’s parent. The parent asked me to call because she wanted to discuss what had happened. Her daughter had reported to her that she got in trouble with me. When asked in what way, she told her mother the story of what I had simple perceived as a redirection. She, however, saw it as "in trouble”. I could have walked away focusing on how that message got so lost in translation, but I decided to take a different perspective. Instead, it was a window into the power of my role as teacher, personalizer-of-learning and leadership-nurturer (the latter two being my own private titles). I wanted to show my student the power of her self-talk in navigating through the election process and any other challenges ahead. She saw it as being chastised. Clearly, everything we teachers say or do can make or break a child’s spirit. That is more powerful that teaching content or “hard” skills.

I will use the term soft skills as an umbrella for emotional intelligence, self-awareness, communication acumen and interpersonal skills. I have no real understanding of why these crucial skills are referred to as a soft. They are not ephemeral but are, instead, cumulative and growing ever more important in my personal and professional life. For our students, this is an area that requires explicit and modelled instruction, and every moment is a teachable one. Every nuance of each glance or gesticulation can hurt or help our students learn these skills or anything at all from us.

Are we primed for these skills as educators? At no point in my training was I taught to think about how I speak or interact with a student. There was no soft skill training module in my course or practicum work. Maybe things have changed and the new teachers are taught how to be their best selves as well as how to model the skills we are required to teach. I wasn’t schooled in the right word choice for each individual to understand how my “soft” skills could impact learning success rates. Being personable and encouraging are not required prerequisites for those entering the profession, though I really wish they were. Medicine is not the only profession that needs to work on its bedside manner.

The bigger challenge, however, is the conundrum of asking people who do not have these skills, almost at all, to actually teach them. How can teachers be expected to educate students in these skills if they don’t cultivate soft skills of their own? How, as well, can administrators require their teachers to model and teach these skills when many of them seem to be missing the crucial empathy gene? Maybe we should try harder to soften our hearts and open our minds to those seemly esoteric skillsets that probably matter more to teaching students and having them learn from us.

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