Leveraging Teachable Moments to Develop Soft Skills for K-12 Students

Graduate-Level Credit / Non-Credit Hours
3 Semester Credits or 45 Clock Hours

Course Description

Participants in this course will learn how to build academic success by exploring and developing tools to increase K-12 students’ soft skills (communication, work ethic, leadership, personal responsibility, and listening.) They will recognize and prioritize their students’ soft skills that will be valuable in reaching future goals, remaining optimistic, and dealing with conflict in their schooling. Participants will explore a series of strategies for reaching and helping students learn appropriate behaviors, strategies for the future, and ways to help prepare them for college and career readiness. Research is based on the works of Robert W. Gaines, II, Ph.D., Meca B. Mohammed, Ph.D., Cheryl Talley, Ph.D., and Marcheta Evans, Ph.D., among others. Foundational work in this course will include the research on understanding soft skills, strategies to develop soft skills, bringing students' soft skills to reach within the classroom, and the different types of soft skills: communication, work ethic, leadership, personal responsibility, and listening. Participants will synthesize these paradigms and develop a new understanding of the role that soft skills can play in student learning, along with new tools and techniques for cultivating students’ soft skills.

Global Goals of the Course

The following global goals of the course exist to deepen and/or apply the content and skills of teachers’ existing professional knowledge:

1. To examine current research on best practices to help students develop soft skills.
2. To understand the need for effective teaching strategies to develop soft skills for students in today’s K-12 classrooms.
3. To analyze current practices to foster student engagement to better support learning and soft skills development.
4. To explore possible applications or modify the classroom to respond to students’ needs.
5. To explore research-proven methods of lesson plan development that lead to developing the soft skills of students through meaningful learning experiences.
6. To synthesize best practices of soft skill development regarding communication, work ethic, leadership, personal responsibility, and listening.

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• Self-Paced 1
• Structured 0
• Site Based 0
• Interactive 0