Five Success Skills

This week’s article summary is The Five Success Skills Every Student Should Master.

We all recognize the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EQ); there’s even solid research (here's a recent article that shows how EQ trumps IQ as the most important criterion for success in life.

The article’s author believes that the two most important aspects of EQ are the ability to know oneself and the ability to work well with others—what psychologists refer to as agency (sense of self) and communion (sense of others).

According to the article, schools and teachers in a high-stake testing age often become too singularly focused on ‘scholastic skills’ and don’t spend enough time more developing in their students what the author calls the Formative Five: Empathy, Self-Control, Integrity, Embrace of Diversity, and Grit.

Imagine how different schools could be if instead of English, Social Studies, Math, Science, Spanish/French, Art, Music, PE, etc. schools looked at and assessed their students through the lens of the Formative Five?

Of course, the core knowledge/skills of academic content remains important (for example, there’s more and more research about how critical background knowledge is to reading comprehension), yet when schools foster EQ development both to strengthen a child’s sense of self and sincere care and concern for others, kids are forming an SEL foundation for future success.

Here’s a very short quiz on to what extent schools (public and private) attend to SEL needs. (I was surprised at some of the correct answers and I scored a meager 3 of out of 8.)

As the author concludes, when we focus in class on the Formative Five “we are developing people who will make a positive contribution in every situation, whether solving a problem at work, coaching a 3rd grade sports team, or being a good friend.”

I am so glad that when we as a faculty developed Trinity’s Program Pillars five years ago we made sure character foundation was a major student outcome of a Trinity education!

Joe

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We educators often fall into the forest and trees trap when we focus incessantly on the scholastic skills that students will need in the future, and fail to consider the larger question of how problems are solved.

If we step back and look at the big picture—if we consider what is essential in every situation, regardless of what technology or the workplace may require—it’s the ability to know oneself and work with others, our human literacy, that is essential for success. Today and tomorrow, people with strong intrapersonal and interpersonal success skills will be better able to solve just about every problem.

On that rare occasion when a problem truly is best solved solo, a strong intrapersonal intelligence provides the self-control needed to focus and fuels the grit required to persevere through frustrations and failures

If the problem is being addressed by a team, group, committee, or task force—all slightly different configurations that each require people to work together—the group will be more effective when people listen to one another, work to understand each other, and appreciate the differences we possess in background, status, and perspective. Character matters, too. We want to work with honorable people who are motivated to do the right thing because it’s the right thing.

The qualities I call the “formative five”—empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit—comprise these intrapersonal and interpersonal success skills and become human literacy.

These success skills must be consciously taught, included in the curriculum at every grade level and in every subject matter. The difference between empathy and sympathy—embracing the feelings held by others and seeing things the way they do versus simply mourning their condition—should be taught to elementary grade students, for example. High school students should investigate when protagonists in literature have exhibited honesty but not integrity. Self-control should be a focus in every class, as students work to improve by identifying and changing habits that are counterproductive to their learning.

Teachers and principals should look for opportunities to help children understand their backgrounds and biases as a first step in appreciating and celebrating others who are different than themselves. A school’s halls and walls should highlight student growth and positive trajectory, not just displaying perfect papers or the art work of the top 10% of the students. And everyone appreciating the role of good failures in learning—working to make new mistakes—creates a learning organization.

Teachers and principals sometimes agree that these success skills should be taught, but they add that they don’t have enough time to address them. It’s true that we do a much better job of adding expectations than discarding responsibilities, but these success skills are too important not to be directly taught throughout the curriculum. When we teach empathy, self-control, integrity, embracing diversity, and grit, we are developing people who will make a positive contribution in every situation, whether solving a problem at work, coaching a 3rd grade sports team, or being a good friend.

Because we measure what we value, we need to find ways to assess and share students’ progress in these success skills. That doesn’t mean assigning letter grades or numerical scores; it means using rubrics, student reflections, and digital photographs of performances or group efforts to capture where students began and how far they have progressed. Classroom walls and bulletin boards can have photos of students learning about and exhibiting human literacy. The success skills should be taught with intentionality and transparency, so students should be involved in creating the rubrics then reflecting upon and monitoring their progress. We cannot let our efforts to teach human literacy be deterred by the fact that these skills are less amenable to measuring and counting than traditional areas.

When we think about the future and what skills and understandings our students will need to be successful, we must begin with the end in mind: We want to develop good people. By asking what kind of people we want on our team and in our neighborhood, we will appreciate the need to teach human literacy.