Creating Communicators and Critical Thinkers: Soon There Will Be A Test For That
‘Soft’ or ‘durable’ skills are becoming more important for students, but there's been little effort to define what makes someone good at them — until now.
;)
Education news and commentary, delivered right to your inbox.
Sign up for The 74 newsletter.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
Educators at the Making Waves Academy knew they wanted to teach high school students to be good communicators, problem solvers and critical thinkers to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
English and math still matter, said Patrick O’Donnell, CEO of the foundation that supports the charter school north of Oakland, California. But having the ability to reason, research and adapt will be crucial as technologies like artificial intelligence change all aspects of life and the workplace.
“If students can really progress in these skills, they’re almost like launch pad skills,” he said.
But there was a big challenge: How do you go about teaching them? How do you even define these so-called “soft” or “durable” skills? While most people have an intuitive sense of what skills like creativity and collaboration are, few have ever broken them down into clear components schools can use to teach students and test whether students have learned them.
Until now.
Several companies and non-profits are taking these skills that have been fuzzy concepts and working on giving them shape and definition. They’re gathering teachers, developers of tests, business leaders and other experts to break down these skills into smaller skills and then into even smaller subskills and nuances that can serve as steps toward mastery. Communications, for instance, could include negotiating and public speaking as subskills.
The resulting outlines of skills and subskills are like a tree branching out from its trunk into smaller and smaller limbs, all with an eye to making them as teachable and testable as math or English.
“There’s no system of capturing (these skills) and measuring them, because, frankly, we haven’t valued them as at the same level that we have academic skills,” said Laura Slover, managing director of Skills for the Future, a leader in trying to define and test soft skills.
“As the world is changing, so must we,” Slover said. “We’re trying to make what is invisible visible…How do we flip the discussion about college applications and getting jobs, from how someone looks on paper to showing evidence of what they’re capable of?”
Efforts to flesh out these long-undefined skills come as researchers, including, theand, most recently, the XQ Institute, a nonprofit that promotes soft skills, have increasingly highlighted their importance in the changing economy.
XQ earlier this year listed developing measurements of soft skills one of its 10 keys to adapting high school education for the future.
The effort is still in its early stages. Skills For The Future released its — earlier this year, so lesson plans and tests of soft skills are still being developed. But Making Waves was able last school year to use to plan lessons on communication and of how students can take criticism constructively.
With communication, for example, O’Donnell said teachers focus on public speaking — one of 10 different aspects of communication Pathsmith identified — then on having students prepare an “elevator speech” — a quick pitch of themselves or a project they can give in just a few seconds.
“We gave students a template of components in an elevator pitch,” O’Donnell said. “Then we also had a lesson on how a strong elevator pitch is both what you say and how you say it. (That) includes things like eye contact and pacing and verbal intonation.”
Tim Taylor, president of America Succeeds, a nonprofit that’s one of the major partners in Pathsmith, said he hopes the breakdowns of 10 skills the organization released in 2024 will help other companies develop ways to teach these skills as well as test them so employers can have some certainty a student has mastered them. Those skills include leadership, fortitude, character and mindfulness, as well as the three that Skills For The Future has tackled.
“With the advent of AI, when everybody has the same AI, then the things that really differentiate you are these durable skills,” Taylor said. “It’s your critical thinking, collaboration, growth mindset.”
“I’m old enough that I developed a lot of these skills by being feral and running around my neighborhood and having my peers tell me I was being a jerk,” Taylor added. “I think that the current generation is spending more time on their phones and less time really interacting face to face, and they’re not developing these skills in the same way. But employers still demand them in order to get and keep a job.”
The OECD has tried to start on a test given in many countries, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) the last several years. The OECD hopes to branch out into others.
An online assessment known as the has tried to gauge student skills of analysis, inference, evaluation, induction, and deduction for several years, even being used by some universities to verify whether students were learning well.
Skills For the Future, a partnership between six states, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Educational Testing Service, the company best known for running the SAT and GRE exams, already has prototypes of tests for high school students on collaboration, communication and critical thinking undergoing trials in a few schools in partnering states.
The backbone of those tests are the detailed “skills progressions” released earlier this year outlining the three skills by breaking them down into three or four major subskills, then multiple “indicators” within each subskill.
It also shows how a student can progress in stages, not with A-F grades, but instead using “exploring” a skill at the start, to “analyzing; “integrating” it into their work and then “extending” use of it.
Communication, for example, is broken down into four subskills:
- Different communication modes, such as written vs verbal
- Adapting communication styles to different audiences
- Listening to others for deeper meaning
- Understanding and adapting to different emotional or ethical dynamics of an interaction
Critical thinking also has four major components: How students seek information, analyze it, form arguments and then reason with logic.
The breakdowns then go deeper into each skill. About half the evaluation of communication, for example, focuses on how well a student conveys a message. Beginners should recognize that communication should differ for different goals, such as whether to explain, inform, persuade, or entertain. At higher levels, a student should know how to tailor communication to the goal, as well as consider the needs of different audiences and respond to cues from an audience about how well the message is received.
The other half of the communication subskills, though, focus on how well a student is hearing and understanding communication from others. That might include pausing before responding to be sure others have expressed themselves fully, adapting to cultural differences of others, asking questions to clarify what someone said or picking up on messages that may be implied but not clearly stated.
“Can you express the same idea in different ways?” asked ETS researcher Teresa Ober. “I think it’s maybe the easiest (subskill) to grasp, but it can also be kind of the most challenging to convey, right? Maybe you explain something one way and a person doesn’t quite understand it, Can you explain it in a slightly different way.”
“It’s also really important to be able to use visuals very effectively, right?” Ober added. “We’re often used to giving presentations with PowerPoint slides and so forth. So, how can you take an idea and just present it as succinctly as possible?”
Similarly, critical thinking covers component skills such as fact-checking, using multiple sources of information, using evidence over opinion in reaching conclusions, using deductive reasoning and recognizing and avoiding logical fallacies,
Ober said that because the skills progressions are designed for tests and to guide teachers in rating students, many of the indicators are behaviors a teacher can observe a student doing, or not doing. She compared them to the “I can” statements teachers use as goals for lessons — can a student say “I can” perform a skill.
“The indicators are still pretty general, but they allow us to get that much closer to observable behaviors,” Ober said. “Because we are a measurement organization, we are really focused on things that we can observe, right, that provide evidence of a particular construct, a particular competency.”
Skills for the Future hopes to have new assessments of collaboration, communication and critical thinking that include exams but also ways of allowing students to demonstrate mastery with projects or presentations available for schools to try out by fall.
It’s also looking at adaptations for colleges.
While Skills For The Future has built its frameworks with schools as its starting point, Pathsmith focuses on business needs first. Formed from America Succeeds, a Denver-based non-profit, and the Lightcast research and consulting company, formerly known as Emsi Burning Glass, it developed outlines of 10 skills by searching 80 million job advertisements for traits companies seek the most. The CompTIA digital training and certification company also joined the partnership.
“We define durable skills as how you use what you know, then how you show up in the world,” Taylor added. “The goal is to be able to signal to employees what you know, what you can do related to these skills, at what level.”
Similar to Skills for the Future, Pathsmith breaks each skill into subskills — between four and eight for each of the 10 — and also spells out how skills develop over time through four performance levels — emerging, developing, applying, succeeding.
With communication, for example, Pathsmith divides it into eight subskills or contexts that each require different approaches. These include written vs. verbal, negotiations, customer service, on social media and public speaking.
Insuring someone has skills in all these areas matters to different businesses, said Jason Tyszko, senior vice president at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, which uses some of the breakdown in its youth training programs.
Financial services companies, he noted, will care if someone can send clear, concise and polite notes to customers and write internal reports properly.
“Now, if I’m on a manufacturing floor, what I need to know is, when there’s a safety condition that is about to go wrong, how are you communicating effectively, loudly and as clearly as possible to prevent an injury on the job?” Tyszko said. “And how are you making sure that you are reinforcing in a clear and consistent manner safety protocols to avoid injury or to avoid the line going down.”
Pathsmith doesn’t have tests of the skills in the pipeline yet, though it hopes vendors will step forward to develop some, so that students can prove to employers they have a skill in a way employers will trust.
“We don’t want to say who can build it and who can’t,” Taylor said. “We just want to make sure that the market has an opportunity to start with a really quality back end, and they don’t have to start from scratch.”
Whether universities and companies buy into the tests and treat the ratings as real credentials for college admissions and hiring will be key to whether either Pathsmith or Skills To The Future frameworks succeed..
“I would say, let them compete and see which one ends up getting more adoption than the other,” said the Chamber of Commerce’s Tyszko. “But there’s room for both, as far as I’m concerned.”
Did you use this article in your work?
We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.
Patrick O’Donnell is a correspondent at The 74, covering the impact of the pandemic on America's education system
[email protected]