Students Practice Soft Skills in the IB Programme

At AISL, our students use visible thinking strategies to extend their thinking and communicate their ideas with others.  This post uses an example of how to use the Think Puzzle Explore strategy to analyze and reflect on a claim from LinkedIn.

Think:
According to Linkedin, research has revealed that these are the top five soft skills companies are looking for in employees: creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

Students in the IB practice these skills throughout their school experience. They are encouraged through visible thinking routines, inquiry, and stimulating project design to think creatively. They learn about persuasion in a variety of ways: talks, creating movies and advertisements, analysing texts in all subjects and recognising and understanding bias and manipulation in devices and emotive language. Students collaborate through various learning strategies. Advisory lessons and subject specific lessons, enable students to practise  the IB Learner profile attributes and Approaches to Learning skills (ATLs). Emotional intelligence in particular perspective is practiced. Students are asked to understand another viewpoint and really put themselves in someone else's shoes to understand their perspective. International students certainly get to practice adaptability as they move around the world and meet people of different cultures. Part of the IB mission statement reads: “These (IB) programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.”

Puzzle: I wonder if these soft skills will change as a result of the upheaval COVID-19 has brought about? If more people start working from home in the future, will this change the soft skills companies are looking for? And what will those be?

Extend: As I reflect on the last few months with teachers, parents, and students changing to distance learning, I think about how we have all needed these skills to adjust to the new experience. Teachers have had to be even more creative in order to reach students. We have made videos and upskilled tech-wise generally, and set tasks that we hoped were more appealing, so that students would be motivated to complete these tasks in their homes. We have had to be flexible in how and when learning was submitted, and we have had to find new ways to build positive relationships in order to persuade students to continue learning. Parents and students, as they reflect on these skills, may realise how they have had to hone these skills too in order to be successful.
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Ingrid Turner - MYP Coordinator/Language and Literature Teacher

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