Lesson 1 - Skills Needed in a Digital Age

5. Developing Skills

What methods of teaching are most likely to develop soft skills?

In fact, we can learn a lot from research about skills and skill development (see, for instance, Fischer, 1980, Fallow and Steven, 2000):

• Skills development is relatively context specific. In other words, skills need to be embedded within a knowledge domain. For example, problem-solving in medicine is different from problem-solving in business. First of all, of course, the content base used to solve problems is different. Less well understood though is that somewhat different processes and approaches are used to solve problems in these domains (for instance, decision-making in medicine tends to be more deductive, business more intuitive; medicine is more risk-averse, business is more likely to accept a solution that will contain a higher element of risk or uncertainty). Embedding skills within a particular context such as a subject discipline is perhaps the biggest challenge for educational institutions in a digital age. How well does an ability to think critically about English literature transfer to other areas of critical thinking, such as political analysis or assessing the behavior of a workplace colleague? In many cases, some elements of these soft skills do transfer well but other parts are more context-specific. More attention needs to be paid to what is known about the transfer of skills, based on research, and to ensure this evidence affects the way we teach.
• Learners need practice – often a good deal of practice – to reach mastery and consistency in a particular skill.
• Skills are often best learned in relatively small steps, with ‘jumps’ increasing as mastery is approached. 
• Learners need feedback on a regular basis to learn skills quickly and effectively; immediate feedback is usually better than late feedback.
• Although skills can be learned by trial and error without the intervention of a teacher, coach, or technology, skills development can be greatly enhanced or speeded up with appropriate interventions, which means adopting appropriate teaching methods and technologies for skills development.
• We shall see later that although content can be transmitted equally effectively through a wide range of media, skills development is much more tied to specific teaching approaches and technologies.

What are the implications of this for not only teaching methods, but also curriculum design? It is worth remembering that unlike competencies, many ‘high-level’ soft skills such as critical thinking are cumulative and do not have a clear endpoint. Serena Williams keeps winning not because she continues to get faster and stronger than younger players, but because she continues to hone her skills (including strategy) to a level that compensates for her diminishing strength and speed.

Soft skills need to be developed over a program (indeed a lifetime) rather than in a single course. How do we identify then how to build critical thinking skills for example from the first year through to graduation in a particular discipline? How does the development of skills in later stages build on work done earlier in a program?