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eSchool News
How to teach the 15 skills students need for success
By Katrina Salazar, CEO, Wethink
January 15th, 2021
Some skills aren’t easily taught, but they’re essential as students leave school and enter the global workforce
21st century skills. Social and emotional learning skills. “Soft”
skills. Whatever you choose to call them, there is a set of skills that
are essential for success in school, work, and life — and yet teaching
and assessing these skills in a formal, structured way can be
challenging.
According to a report from McKinsey & Co., the global workforce
will undergo a dramatic shift as a result of automation. The need for
basic cognitive skills will decline by 15 percent over the course of
this decade, while skills that can’t easily be replaced by computers
—social and emotional skills such as leadership and empathy, and higher
cognitive skills such as creativity and critical thinking — will be in
high demand.
These are the skills we should be teaching in schools if we want to
prepare students for the jobs of the future: skills that make us
uniquely human, that differentiate us from machines. The ability to
solve complex problems, adapt on the fly to rapidly changing
circumstances, and dig deeper when the going gets tough, among others.
Honing these skills not only positions students for success in the
workforce; it also prepares them to overcome adversity in school and
life. It makes them more complete human beings who are able to thrive
in any number of of situations and cultivate rich, rewarding
relationships with others.
Schools often struggle to teach and assess these foundational skills.
However, working with researchers at Kansas University’s Achievement
and Assessment Institute, we’ve developed a framework for doing just
that. What’s more, we can teach these critical skills in a way that
deeply resonates with students — by having them play popular video
games like League of Legends or Overwatch.
Gaming is actually a fitting platform for students to learn the core
skills for success. Many of the attributes they’ll need to excel in
school or the workforce — teamwork, problem solving, and so on —
correlate with success in the game world and other arenas.
We’ve identified 33 discrete skills that we can teach, measure, and
develop through game play. From this list, we chose 15 of the most
relevant skills that apply to gaming, and we’ve grouped them into five
different categories. They are…
Leadership
• Assertiveness: Expressing one’s feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others.
• Decision making: Judiciously evaluating all available information to arrive at an optimal way of thinking or acting.
• Resource management: Taking inventory of, tracking, and actively
being aware of available resources in order to be better prepared.
Teamwork
• Collaboration: Working together with others to achieve a goal desired by all.
• Conflict resolution: The reduction of discord between individuals or
groups through the use of active strategies such as negotiation,
bargaining, or compromise.
• Adaptability: The ability to adjust one’s emotional response in an
optimal manner for a given situation, successfully recover from
disadvantageous circumstances, or adjust positively to change.
Communication
• Active listening: A process of listening to another person closely
and attentively, and asking questions as needed, to understand the
other person’s message and emotions.
• Empathy: The capacity for understanding, being aware of, being
sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and
experiences of another.
• Friendliness: The quality of appearing likeable and trustworthy to other people and demonstrating caring and respect for them.
Problem solving
• Creativity: The ability to produce and develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts.
• Critical thinking: The process of conceptualizing, analyzing,
synthesizing, and applying information in an objective manner in order
to arrive at a conclusion or form a judgment.
• Goal setting: The process of identifying something you want to
achieve and methodically planning the steps you can take to attain this
goal.
Character
• Grit: The ability to persist in the face of difficult challenges, resulting in successful goal attainment.
• Ownership: Taking responsibility for one’s actions or contributions to a particular outcome.
• Self-control: The ability to control oneself mentally, emotionally,
and behaviorally, especially in difficult or oppositional situations.
When we introduce these skills to students, we typically start with the
skills related to character. We talk about what “character” means
within the context of gaming: how students pick the character they’re
going to be in the video game, and how each character has certain
skills, strengths, and weaknesses. To succeed within the game, students
have to understand their character’s attributes and also those of the
other characters they’re playing with. This is how we get them to think
about their own personal skills and attributes, and we talk about what
“character” means outside the world of gaming.
Once students have an understanding of the skills that correlate with
success, they break into teams to play a game. Immediately after the
game is over, students are asked to rate themselves and their teammates
on how well they applied these various skills within the game.
This self-reflection is very powerful, and it has a huge effect on how
students approach the game the next time they play. It’s fascinating to
see how quickly their behavior changes from one game to the next as
they consciously try to apply certain skills.
We use a series of algorithmic models to measure each student’s skills
and track their growth over time, based on their own and their peers’
assessments — and we’re seeing tremendous growth in the skills that
matter most for success.
At Jane Addams High School in Los Angeles, students initially mistook
assertiveness for being rude. Through successive game playing, they had
a massive breakthrough, realizing that rudeness and assertiveness are
two different things. “I feel as if I did even better at this game and
was able to assert myself even more without being rude,” one student
wrote in a self-reflection.
In the Lennox School District, an urban district outside Los Angeles,
95 percent of students in a pilot project improved key skills. In a
striking display of ownership, one fourth-grade girl who was the leader
of her team lost her self-control during game play and wasn’t able to
direct her team. At the end of the game, she stood up and said, “I just
want to apologize to my team because I forgot to be positive, and it
lost us this game. I know we can do it, and I’ll be more positive next
time. Thank you guys for supporting me.”
Focusing on grades and test scores alone is a very one-dimensional way
to assess students’ abilities; it doesn’t provide much insight into how
we can help them flourish. Schools need to become proficient at
teaching and measuring the skills that underlie success in any
endeavor. These 15 skills are an excellent start, and gaming marks an
ideal platform for learning them.
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