This book will introduce fourteen of the most important soft skills in the field of education. It will explain how each skill is used in teaching as well as ideas for how to model and explain them in college classrooms, field experiences, and student teaching. The chapters also contain ideas for administrators and mentor teachers who are working with beginning teachers. Hopefully, by learning the soft skills of teaching, pre-service education students and beginning teachers will become successful instructors and models of good citizenship in future classrooms.
Soft Skills for the Workplace is a nontraditional approach to learning basic employability skills needed in today's workplace. Well-developed soft skills help an individual find a job, perform well in the workplace, and gain personal success in life and career. By studying this text, you will learn the soft skills that employers recommend, and require, of employees. Learning how to interact professionally with customers, coworkers, and employers is one sure way to prepare for your future. In today's workplace, it is necessary to have job-specific skills to perform on the job as well as know-how to interact with coworkers and customers. You may be the most qualified person in your field in terms of hard skills, but if you lack soft skills, you may have a challenge finding and retaining employment. No matter your career choice, Soft Skills for the Workplace will help you help you jump-start your future. In today's competitive work environment, well-developed employability skills can help you stand out in the crowd Soft skills are the new hard skills for the 21st century.
This book examines the global movement of putting more emphasis on students’ social and emotional development in education. It provides some order in the unstructured multitude of desirable socio-emotional educational objectives and ambitions that have resulted from this movement and builds on a careful conceptual analysis. It starts out by examining the roots of the movement and discusses different emphases. Next it makes use of instructional and psychological constructs and theories to arrive at meaningful categorizations of major domains and types of social-emotional “skills”. One of the key assumptions is that social and emotional attributes are malleable by means of educational interventions. The book reviews available research evidence for this assumption, taking into account psychological studies and meta-analyses. It then creates new evidence based on a new meta-analysis, which concentrated on the effects of educational interventions on skills associated with the conscientiousness factor of the Big5 taxonomy. In the final chapter, the book discusses the implications for educational policy and practice; a discussion in which attention is given to political and ethical questions about the desirability of treating social and emotional attributes as educational goals.
Solve the number one problem with today's young workforce—the soft skills gap The number one challenge with today's young talent is a problem hiding in plain sight: the ever-widening soft skills gap. Today's new, young workforce has so much to offer—new technical skills, new ideas, new perspective, new energy. Yet too many of them are held back because of their weak soft skills. Soft skills may be harder to define and measure than hard skills, but they are just as critical. People get hired because of their hard skills but get fired because of their soft skills. Setting a good example or simply telling young workers they need to improve isn't enough, nor is scolding them or pointing out their failings in an annual review. However you can teach the missing basics to today's young talent. Based on more than twenty years of research, Bruce Tulgan, renowned expert on the millennial workforce, offers concrete solutions to help managers teach the missing basics of professionalism, critical thinking, and followership—complete with ninety-two step-by-step lesson plans designed to be highly flexible and easy to use. Tulgan's research and proven approach has show that the key to teaching young people the missing soft skills lies in breaking down critical soft skills into their component parts, concentrating on one small component at a time, with the help of a teaching-style manager. Almost all of the exercises can be done in less than an hour within a team meeting or an extended one-on-one. The exercises are easily modified and customized and can be used as take-home exercises for any individual or group, to guide one-on-one discussions with direct-reports and in the classroom as written exercises or group discussions. Managers—and their young employees—will find themselves returning to their favorite exercises over and over again. One exercise at a time, managers will build up the most important soft skills of their new, young talent. These critical soft skills can make the difference between mediocre and good, between good and great, between great and one of a kind.
Children today are going through a lot—they are busy with school, involved in extracurricular activities, and trying to navigate the world of COVID and other concerns. Teachers and parents are busy too—with work, school, and parenting activities. How will they have the time to teach valuable skills such as manners and respect to children? These are “soft skills”; the skills necessary to work with others and be a respected and valuable citizen in the workplace of tomorrow. Soft Skills for Kids: In Schools, at Home, and Online, 2nd Edition, focuses on ways that teachers and parents can work together to teach soft skills to the children in their lives. This book is not a curriculum program or set of lessons to help children, but rather a series of “teachable moments” in which adults teach strategies to children as they happen. Finally, as the education of children has changed recently due to the pandemic with an increased number of children learning online, this book will be a great resource for how adults can work together to help children learn soft skills—in schools, at home, and online.
This book presents recent research on interactive collaborative learning. We are currently witnessing a significant transformation in the development of education and especially post-secondary education. To face these challenges, higher education has to find innovative ways to quickly respond to these new needs. On the one hand, there is a pressure by the new situation in regard to the COVID pandemic. On the other hand, the methods and organizational forms of teaching and learning at higher educational institutions have changed rapidly in recent months. Scientifically based statements as well as excellent experiences (best practice) are absolutely necessary. These were the aims connected with the 24th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2021), which was held online by Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, on 22–24 September 2021. Since its beginning in 1998, this conference is devoted to new approaches in learning with a focus on collaborative learning in Higher Education. Nowadays, the ICL conferences are a forum of the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Learning and Engineering Pedagogy. In this way, we try to bridge the gap between ‘pure’ scientific research and the everyday work of educators. This book contains papers in the fields of Teaching Best Practices Research in Engineering Pedagogy Engineering Pedagogy Education Entrepreneurship in Engineering Education Project-Based Learning Virtual and Augmented Learning Immersive Learning in Healthcare and Medical Education. Interested readership includes policymakers, academics, educators, researchers in pedagogy and learning theory, schoolteachers, learning industry, further and continuing education lecturers, etc
This book is among the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the implementation of soft skills in universities in the developing country, Vietnam. The context is unique as the implementation is taking place within the distinctive socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics of the country, amidst several simultaneously-executed educational reforms. Tran lays down the foundation for discussion by providing readers with a comprehensive review of how soft skills implementation has come into existence in higher education across the globe, before diving into the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities. He goes on to highlight the interesting differences in the conceptualization of soft skills between Vietnamese universities and those in the West. The book depicts and compares how university leaders and managers tackle contextual factors, submit to constraints enforced by political forces, and how they use institutional advantages available for implementation. It goes further to examine how personal and contextual factors affect teachers’ and students’ engagement with the implementation, and highlights the role of work-integrated learning and extra-curricular activities in developing soft skills for students. Finally, the book investigates the contribution of external stakeholders, such as alumni, employers, skills experts, and local authorities, to the implementation and obstacles that prevent their participation. This book will be a valuable reference for the implementation of soft skills in higher education around the world.
I was hired by a major university to teach recently released offenders how to become employed. I walked into my first class intending to follow the lead of all the other job training programs in the city, which was teaching the students to properly fill out applications, write resumes, facilitate mock interviews, and locate employment opportunities. After the first couple of classes, most of the students were either not paying attention or sleeping. I quickly realized my presentation needed to be interesting, challenging, beneficial, and actually guide the participants on how to remain employed. However, I was unable to find any published material for teaching new hires the soft skills necessary to keep a job. This workbook is a compilation of the soft skills class material I have developed over an eighteen year period. I have used this material with great success and have taught soft skills in schools, inner-city church programs, nonprofits, and government funded job training programs. It is a unique collection of essays, exercises, quotes, and maxims that will give students a realistic perspective on work-related expectations and the expectations of the supervisors who hire them. It will help students develop their problem solving skills, guide them in making appropriate decisions, and create a desire to plan out goals and achieve them. The workbook style is challenging and playful, serious and engaging and a stepping stone to developing the cognitive skills necessary to quash unproductive thinking and self-defeating emotional behaviors.
This book, the first of two volumes, uses a framework of philosophical anthropology, and the concepts of humanistic leadership and humanistic management, to explore the value of work in the hospitality and tourism industry. It presents robust theoretical and practical implications for professionalism and excellence at work. This volume addresses the hospitality professional, beginning with an exploration of the foundational literature, before moving on to discuss topics like the concept of human dignity at work, how one can find meaning within the hospitality industry, spirituality at work, philosophy in the world of work, and personal development. These volumes will be of use to academics and practitioners in the fields of hospitality and tourism management, humanistic and transformational leadership, corporate social responsibility, human resource management, customer service, and workplace spirituality.
Despite its name, soft skills are increasingly becoming the hard skills of today's professional world. It is not enough to be highly trained in technical skills without understanding and developing the softer, interpersonal, and relationship-building skills that are critical for professional growth. While technical, "harder" skills may present opportunities for you, it is your soft skills that will maintain those opportunities and provide avenues for new opportunities to present themselves. Your ability to identify and master these soft skills, ranging from critical thinking, dressing for success, networking and personal branding, are critical for achieving professional success. While these soft skills are often undervalued and/or not presented sufficiently to young professionals and pre-professionals, you will learn in this book that...Soft skills are anything but soft!
