Education

Who Should Teach ‘Soft Skills’?

By Kevin Bushweller — July 06, 2007 1 min read
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There’s a lot of talk lately about how schools should be teaching so-called “soft skills,” such as punctuality, respect for deadlines, working well with others, and time management. Undoubtedly, these are very important skills and most of them are all about motivation.

But the question is: Should schools really be responsible for teaching such skills?

The LeaderTalk blog weighs in on this issue with the perspective of an administrator who grew up in a working-class, coal-mining community where everyone learned soft skills early on through jobs they worked at outside of school.

Here is an excerpt from that blog post: “I realize that there’s a balance in life. But soft skills are something I’ve just taken for granted my entire life. I’ll have to do some serious thinking about how to build those into our instruction. If I can only get students to show up to school on time. Even with our positive incentives and negative consequences, that remains a challenge.”

Go here to read more.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Motivation Matters blog.