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May 13, 2020
apps designed to help kids have more self-control were found to be effective.15
two professors who tout the promise of playful learning.
Our mantra endorsed active engagement, meaningful learning, and social interaction in our homes, in our schools, and in our communities.
In Heckman’s address to the Global Education Summit, he encouraged us to drop the idea that we can measure success by a single score on a standardized test—even a test as highly regarded as the PISA.16 Instead, he challenged us to derive a set of skills that children will need to prosper in the world. We take this challenge seriously; the rest of the book describes the solution we offer. Fully recognizing that social skills and personal happiness are also key to success,
we share what the learning sciences tell us about how to rear children to succeed in the 21st century. The changes other countries are making, and the new world we live in, demand that we reinvent our education system so that it instills not just the ABCs but also the 6Cs. The 6Cs provide a suite of so-called hard and “soft skills” that can offer a profile of children’s competencies as they approach the society of tomorrow.
“‘Soft skills’ are centrally important for human capital development and workforce success. A growing evidence base shows that these skills rival academic or technical skills in their ability to predict employment and earnings, among other outcomes.”1
these skills are the bedrock for hard skills. What have been called “soft skills” include collaboration, the ability to regulate your emotions (not flipping out when that meeting doesn’t go your way), and executive function.
Executive function is a fancy term for being flexible in your thinking or finding another way to solve a pesky problem without perseverating.
When you review the business and social science literatures, you find a plethora of terms that fall under the definition of “soft skills.” Among them are adaptability, autonomy, communication skills, creativity, cultural sensitivity, empathy, higher order thinking skills, integrity, planfulness, positive attitude, professionalism, resilience, self-control, self-motivation, social skills, teamwork skills, responsibility, leadership, learning to learn skills, persuasiveness, organization, initiative, character, goal orientation, and so forth. No one would deny that these skills are important,
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Dean Fitzsimmons: My daughter has a 3.9 cumulative average, is a ranked tennis doubles champion, has published two volumes of poetry—and not the kind that rhymes, but the sophisticated, esoteric non-rhyming kind—spent last July building a schoolhouse for disadvantaged Guatemalan children, and cures leukemia on weekends. She’s about to start Middle School, and I want to know what extra clubs she should join to give her a leg-up in the Harvard admission process.4
a glimpse into a distorted portrait of success. Although we agree that hard skills are important for our children, they are just one piece of who they become. If we truly embrace the broader definition of success we have offered, then whether our children become good people and people who are good to others is also part of the equation. No one wants their children to achieve by traditional standards and be miserable. Hail to the marketers—the learning industry—that has caricatured children as commodities and grades as the primary route to a bright future. Although we certainly applaud those
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The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers [emphasis added]. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.7
Instead of trying to motivate people from the outside with rewards, Pink argued that the ability to learn and create new things and to improve our world is the motivation that really matters. That comes from the inside!
The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management.9 More than 400 employers were asked what skills they considered most important and whether high school, 2-year college, or 4-year college graduates had these desired skills. It is interesting that the top five ranked skills were oral communication, teamwork, professionalism, written communication, and critical thinking or problem solving. And 81% of responders also considered creativity and innovation very important.
Only 24% of current 4-year college graduates were rated as excellent in the skills needed for success in today’s world.
A new generation of learners was growing up with access to information literally at their fingertips. Business, science, art, transportation—virtually any field you can name—is moving deftly across geographic boundaries, and our ways of learning and processing information are morphing overnight. For the first time in our memory, business leaders who think about their requirements for employees and child psychologists are talking the same language and looking for the same benchmarks. Only our school system seems to be stuck somewhere in the agrarian societies of past centuries.
book, A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool,15 that advocated the value of play
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book, A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool,15 that advocated the value of play as a metaphor for the kind of active, engaged, and meaningful learning that occurs when a child masters counting by playing Chutes and Ladders and when he understands stories through the tales of King Arthur and his valiant knights. Our book celebrated the science of learning in action and concluded with what we called the 5Cs—a skill set for the 21st century designed in the lab for the living room. These included collaboration (or how children learn to work together and see from another’s point of view),
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Soft skills develop in the sandbox - through play
essay for The New York Times16 in late 2009, the 5Cs had morphed
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Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making, a superb book that appeared in 2010 outlining seven essential life skills for success in the modern world.
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books by Pellegrino and Hilton (2012; Education for Life and Work) and by Laura Greenstein (2012; Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning) that offer tools for assessing students’ achievement in a variety of skills, as well as research-based ideas on how to adapt the Common Core for the 21st century. Their
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All of these initiatives have one thing in common. They go beyond supporting the notion that mastering hard skills alone will pave the road to success.
“Hard skills are the foundation of a successful career. But soft skills are the cement.”19
Play develops soft skills
Our skill set, the 6Cs, consists of six skills that address the following needs: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence.
our skills are malleable. Anyone can achieve new levels within each skill, and no one will ever completely master each skill in all content areas. These skills are not traits nor are they to be achieved once and checked off a list.
encouraging families to help their children develop these skills outside the context of school.
Schools today mostly teach the hard skills. It takes more than hard skills to foster a child who is happy and productive. The Cs we selected are tools children can use to enrich their personal and professional lives, tools that can serve our kids throughout their lives as they continually improve and expand.
study published in the American Journal of Public Health illustrated how crucial the “soft skills” really are. The researchers followed 753 children who were in kindergarten i...
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Kindergarten students who were socially competent and did things such as sharing, cooperating, or helping other kids were more likely to attain higher education and well-paying jobs than those who were less socially competent. Neither race nor gender mattered—indeed,
on a 5-point scale, some really interesting findings emerged: For every single point of increase in social skills, children were twice as likely to go to college and 46% more likely to have a full-time job at the age of 25.
Social skills predict children’s successful lives and careers in adulthood.
Collaboration is the ultimate soft skill that all other skills build on because when we enter the world alone and incompetent, the first thing we do is to make contact with other humans.
Collaboration is at the heart of these changes because by working in teams we build community and mutual respect.
from the earliest ages we learn from people. Especially when those other people—parents, caregivers, teachers, friends, and coworkers—are sensitive and responsive to what we want to know.
Today, sophisticated computer technology—tablets, smartphones—is already having a dramatic effect on communication between parents and children.1 Go to any fast-food restaurant and you will observe the phenomenon for yourself. Out of 55 parents, 40 were on a cell phone or tablet when eating with their kids. Not only did they talk less with their kids than they might have, but 73% were totally absorbed with their devices, staring down and virtually ignoring anything but the screen.
humans are not special because of their big brains. That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships—no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.3
The fact that people talk means the placement of our larynx makes us much more likely to choke on our food than other animals. This is clearly evolutionarily crazy. Yet the choking hazard is outweighed by the fact that language is a huge evolutionary advantage.
Collaboration, he wrote, is the basis for all human culture: “This new mode of understanding other persons [and collaborating with other people] changed the nature of all types of social interactions . . . so that a unique form of cultural evolution began to take place over historical time.”6
Remember that section on our report cards: “Works and plays well with others”? It turns out that section captures something genuinely crucial to our success—in our personal relationships as well as with our colleagues in the workplace.
you don’t have the soft skill of getting along with people, you can’t be empathic and keep from saying anything that pops into your head.
Researchers have found that differences in self-control as early as age 7 can predict how much time people are unemployed 4 decades later.8 Being unable to control your impulses and emotional expression leads to conflict and makes collaboration almost impossible.
How do kids learn to collaborate? The science of learning has suggested that we progress through a series of four levels.
LEVEL 1: ON MY OWN
Sadly, we see Level 1 in many, though not all, of the nation’s classrooms. Children are increasingly encouraged to sit on their own, not speaking to or working with others, and little to no collaboration is encouraged. Believe it or not, there are adults in every walk of life who are still at Level 1. In 1991, management consultant Geary Rummler is credited with inventing the term silo syndrome.11 Now a hackneyed phrase, it was designed to capture how units within a corporation can develop their own cultures. They can even have difficulty talking to each other—clear Level 1 behavior. Turf
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LEVEL 2: SIDE BY SIDE
Side by side is an advance over on my own. Toddlers know that they can use others as tools to get things done.
Daniel and Cynthia—3-year-olds—are in the sandbox with their shovels and buckets and castle molds.
Every now and then they might come together for a few moments to pat something down and smooth out the sand, but there is no real collaboration on a common, overarching task. No planning is involved, just momentary joining to get a little job done. No surprise that scientists call this parallel play.
Playing separately demands that the children maintain their own space and not invade each other’s castles. At least they are controlling their impulses that much.
