Blog #3: Growth of Soft Skills

When I think about soft skills development in my chemistry class (the class in which I am implementing PBL this year), my thoughts return to a former chemistry student that I now have in AP Physics.  This young man is quite intelligent (as his presence in an AP Physics class would suggest) but he has a lack of social intelligence.  He is smart enough to recognize this as a limitation and he attempts to work around it but the problem often comes out.  I recall a conversation that I was having with him that he chose to have in front of the other members of the class in which he accused me of lying.  If I did not know him well enough, I might have taken it as a more serious issue.  I tried to help him through the work-around skills that I knew that he had developed, but this was just one of those days and one of those interactions where nothing was working and things were just escalating.  In the end, I simply had to tell him (forcefully) that it was time for him to sit down and keep quiet.

I think about him because I wonder if more attention to soft skills in his time in K-12 might not have given him more tools to be able to work through these bumps in the road for him.  I worry that similar bumps in the future will become serious roadblocks.  I know that educators cannot dedicate all of our time and efforts helping one or two young people fix their deficiencies, but in working with student soft skills this year I realize that there are more than one or two that really would benefit from such skill building.

In this semester far more than last (when I first implemented this form of PBL), I have seen real growth in soft skills. As a teacher of "hard science," I have been thinking about developing a metric by which to measure this development.  I have done qualitative research and I realize that there are limitations and pitfalls of relying strictly on qualitative without quantitative research to provide a foundation on which to apply it.  To be fair, when studying human behavior, quantitative research without qualitative to provide context also has pitfalls and serious limitations.

One of the most important additions that I added to my PBL methodology was behavior contracts.  It pushed my students to think in advance about those expectations of their peers and gave group members a constructive way to deal with the frustration that many had in the past with the "slackers" in their groups.  Before starting or in the early stages of starting the first PBL project with a class, I have students answer 2 questions: 1) what are the positive aspects and 2) what are the negative aspects of doing group projects.  Inevitably, the group members who don't do their fair share of work is at the top of the negative list.  I do this as a hook for getting students to develop a social contract.  Even when the requirements of the contract don't meet the needs, students learn to plan for effectively for the future.  I am convinced that in future group work, they will have skills for developing a set of group expectations and requirements that will help them more effectively negotiate group and team work.  They have learned that keeping their peers "on task" is not just the teacher's responsibility and they have learned to take group responsibility for group success.

This is just one example.  As the Apostle John wrote in the closing verse of his gospel, "If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."  OK, so that bit a bit of an exaggeration, but I hope that you get my point.

Additionally, as I improve and refine my implementation of PBL teaching and learning the manner in which I approach and help students build soft skills will also improve.  In the future when my students have the opportunity to use those heightened soft skills and their success is also heightened, I doubt that many will realize where those improved skills were developed.  A few will.  I will hear from them.  And all the stress of the complaining and resistance to doing things "Mr. Tedder's way" will have been worth it.