7/09/2010 |
(en una verdadera perspectiva global)
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The
quality and skill level of our graduating students is not meeting the
expectations of the business world. How
do we shrink this gap? How do
teachers go about creating these super-graduates who will make up tomorrow’s
workforce? We need to focus more
time and effort on soft skills. i.e. leadership, social skills, and
work habits.
While employers continue to value academic skills in their employees, the employers say their greatest needs are soft skills. In a study based on 51 employer interviews, James Rosenbaum, a Northwestern University sociologist, discovered employers are looking for the following traits:
– Attention to quality;
– Ability to work with others;
– Dependability;
–
Good attendance.
The reality is that
employers do not provide training in soft skills or work habits. These behaviors
must be learned before entering the world of work.
So, how do we develop
these “cutting edge” students who will meet the needs of the 21st
century? How do we transform our
traditional, “old-fashioned” classrooms?97)
Practical
things teachers can do
To help develop the
soft skills and attributes our students need, here are some practical approaches
we can apply in our classrooms:
“Real
world” expectations versus “Educational world” expectations
We can start
by changing our educational expectations to better reflect expectations in the
working world. The educational
world does a disservice to students trying to prepare for the “real world.”
For example, would you buy a little red wagon for your child that only
comes with 75%, or three of its four wheels?
Of course not! Any company
doing such an absurd thing would be out of business in no time.
It would be the business world’s equivalent of earning an “F” grade.
Switch to
the educational world:
Now if a student earned 75% on her math test, she would earn a passing
grade! Hmmm…do you see the
problem here? Most of our
educational system works like this. What
message are we sending students? My
school district considers earning 85% “Very Good” and earning 93% is “Excellent.”
What are we
saying to students about the level of expectations we want them to achieve?
My district has been talking (for many years) about implementing a report
card system based solely on standards and benchmarks instead of A’s, B’s,
and C’s. They say it’s more
like the real world, and I agree. I’ll
believe it when I see it.
How
would the business world evaluate an assignment?
One of my
classes writes complaint letters to businesses that they’ve had a bad
experience with. When introducing
the assignment, I tell my students at the outset that EVERYONE will receive an
“A.” They are always
visibly excited by this opportunity. Why?
Because they’re not accustomed to such opportunities.
They’ve never heard a teacher say something so educationally “outside
the box.”
How
it works
For this
assignment, each student must keep revising his or her business letter until it
is perfect—or as I call it, “Mailable.”
Contrary to what most teachers would anticipate, students continue to be
motivated despite knowing they will all eventually earn the same “A” grade.
They know that the sooner their letter is 100% correct, or “Mailable,”
the sooner they can move on to other things.
How
is this like the business world?
Employees at
Little Red Wagon, Inc. know they must attach all four wheels to the wagon.
Anything less and their boss’s expectations will not be met.
The employees will earn an “A” grade—their paycheck and continued
employment—as long as they keep putting 100% of the expected number of wheels
on each wagon. The business world
won’t, and CAN’T, accept even 99% completion.
Just one missing screw is completely unacceptable.
So why do we continue to accept less in the educational world if we are
preparing students for the business world.
Even
further “outside the box”
I apply the
same business world rationale when giving students their final semester grades.
On the first day students walk into my classroom, they are made aware of
my expectations. One of those
expectations states that, in order to earn a passing grade, ALL assignments must
be completed. It’s amazing how,
at the end of the semester, I seem to have few students with missing work, but
many of my colleagues, who follow the traditional paradigm of grading, do.
An
ever-present challenge teachers have is to try to motivate the unmotivated.
Good teachers have a knack for knowing which “buttons to push” to
inspire students. The reality is
that, no matter how much I want my students to be successful, there will always
be those students who are completely unmotivated and have no intention of
passing my class (or any other class, for that matter).
Those students don’t care if they pass and they don’t do all of my
assignments.
Using a
business world approach to grading, you’ll know very early on who intends to
pass your class and who does not. Using
this knowledge to your benefit, you can better allocate the use of your most
valuable resource, time, toward those students who truly want to achieve.
Quality
vs. Quantity
Remember the
last time you were assigned to write a paper? What
was the first question you asked? Most
of us wanted to know how long the paper had to be.
While it may be human nature to ask this question first, it redirects the
importance of the message onto a focus of how much has to be written.
Unfortunately, sometime during our years in the educational world, quantity
was impressed more than quality.
When it comes
to writing papers, many students tend to operate under the fallacy that more is
better. Students truly believe
their teachers will give higher grades to longer papers.
Making the problem even greater, some of us teachers might have furthered
this perception by allowing our evaluations to be influenced by the quantity
of work submitted rather than its quality.
As a result, font sizes get bigger, margins continue to expand, and
double-spacing prevails!
One teacher
in my department, who is nearing retirement age, always jokes around with his
students about his timesaving method of “grading” papers.
He claims to stand at the top of the steps, toss the papers down, and
give A’s to those heavy papers that fly the furthest, and low grades to the
lighter papers that only fly as far as the first few steps.
The joke exists because students’ have the perception that when turning
in papers, more words will result in a better grade.
Contradictory to the traditional educational world, the world of work
strives to achieve high quality as quickly and efficiently as possible.
100
word essays
In the
business world, quality reigns supreme over quantity.
If you produce 500 little red wagons with only 75%, or three of the four
required wheels, you’re not going to be successful.
Even if you could produce 1,000 more three-wheeled wagons in half the
time, you’d still be equally unsuccessful.
If you assign
your students to write a 100-word essay, you too might find yourself
dissatisfied because most of your students will be focused on trying to come up
with 100 words. Unfortunately, they
will probably be more concerned about creatively inserting every “a, to, it,
as, and the” than they will be about the meaning, correctness, and overall
quality of sentences they are constructing.
The
“real world” alternative: Rubrics
As teachers,
we should have a well thought out purpose for such a writing assignment.
Assuming this, we could assign our essay using a “real world” model
called a rubric. Rather than
specifying a certain length for the assignment, we could use a rubric that lists
the required concepts we want the essay to address. Rubrics force students to
focus on the key concepts rather than the number of words.
A rubric will
also help to keep evaluations objective: the
required concepts are either adequately addressed or they are not.
Additional benefits of a rubric-based assignment are that students will
focus on writing thorough, comprehensive ideas.
The meaningless drivel that accompanies minimum-number-of-words
assignments is avoided—drivel loses its purpose!
Shocking
results!
An amazing
thing happens when you don’t set a minimum quantity requirement.
The assignments will oftentimes contain MORE WORDS than if you had
implemented the “old fashioned” minimum words rule!
Why? Because now the student
clearly knows that his essay is being evaluated on quality, not quantity.
His focus on meeting all of the expectations in the rubric results in a
deeper, thorough reflection of his knowledge—it might be longer, but it’s of
high quality.
We need to
re-evaluate our academic expectations. Once
we have a clear vision of an assignment’s rationale, we can develop rubrics
that clarify what students are expected to know.
By adapting our educational expectations to resemble those found in the
world of work, the quality of our students’ work will grow while the gap
between the educational and business worlds will shrink.
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