Essential Skills, Part Deux

Well, Doug Johnson saw my link to LifeHack’s 10 Essential Skills and has challenged the Edublogosphere to come up with their own lists. Here’s mine:
- The ability to understand and interpret data: So many people - especially in education - try to prop up weak arguments and ideas with even weaker/incomplete/misleading statistics. Worse, many people lack the tools to see when others are doing the same.
- Seeing the big picture/putting things into perspective: People who consider only their little corner of the organization when making decisions will forever remain in that little corner. Teamwork means not only understanding your own “stuff” but how it fits in with everyone else’s “stuff” and collaborating to chart a path accordingly.
- Communication: Okay, I’m a former English teacher, so I suppose this is to be expected. Whether it’s writing, speaking, reading, or listening, there are few jobs that don’t require us to interact with others in varied settings and through diverse media. It’s sad that one of our assistant principals had to send out a blast e-mail to the school clericals reminding them to be polite when answering the phone. And I’ve seen people lose their jobs because they couldn’t write to save their lives.
- Being a good compromiser: The ability to walk into a room where people are fighting and find a solution that meets everyone’s needs is very valuable. It’s a creative, thinking-out-of-the-box act: taking a situation that has reached an impasse and finding a way out.
- Empathy: Right on, Doug. I would go beyond just understanding the needs of others, however, and ask that all leaders know how to minister to those needs. Asking about family, sending a note when someone is sick, complementing a co-worker on a job well done: these little actions mean a lot.
- Critical understanding of technology: It’s about more than just knowing which buttons to push and which icons to click. People need to be able to recognize appropriate tools for a task and use them properly to achieve the desired outcome. They need to be able to reject those tools that are poorly-designed, harmful, and/or irrelevent. Otherwise money gets wasted and there is a backlash.
- Math and logic: The greatest value in math is the habit of mind toward logic which it develops. Geometric proofs, in particular, are valuable because they help students to understand how to work methodically through a problem. I’ve seen so many poor decisions made because people lacked the ability to temper emotion and intuition with a little hard reasoning.
- Creativity: In a world where so many insitutions appear to be failing and/or inadequate to meet the needs of such a rapidly-developing culture, people need to be able to dream up innovative, new solutions to the problems we face. People who succeed are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail, and I think that’s what creativity is all about when you come right down to it.
- Knowing where you put things- both physically and mentally: Complexity seems to be increasing faster than our brains’ capability to manage it. The ability to leverage tools to stay organized - both in terms of physical items, contacts, and appointments as well as ideas and facts - are invaluable. And perhaps part of that means managing a storehouse of facts that we can quickly and easily recall - you never know when someone will name-drop “Harold Pinter” or need to know how to convert gallons to liters. No, I’m not saying it should all be memorized and yes, it can be Googled, but we need to be able to contextualize and use that knowledge effectively.
- Responding well to setbacks: We all identify this as an important skill in children. It even shows up on standards-based elementary report cards. I think it’s equally valuable for adults: the ability to work through any crisis without giving up and without losing your head. In the words of Judge Smails:
It’s easy to grin, when your ship comes in,
And you feel you’ve got the stock market beat,
But the man worthwhile, is the man who can smile,
When his pants are too tight in the seat!
I know I’ll think of at least 2-3 more over the next few hours now that my motor is going…
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My bags may not be packed yet, but at least I’m thinking about what I’ll be bringing to San Antonio when I attend NECC next week. I’m also thinking about where I’ll go, what I’ll do, and who I want to see when I’m there. Undoubtedly, I will be spending a lot of time talking to vendors as I stroll the show floor; I would estimate that in each of my other visits to NECC I’ve probably spent about 5-8 hours walking through the exhibit hall.
In preparing a lesson on internet research last week, I was reminded of just how important it is to try your searches in multiple search engines instead of just relying on one favorite. I was looking for a current topic to explore with the ninth graders with whom I would be working and decided to give the recent protests in Tibet a try. It was fascinating - and very scary - to see the differences between the list of sites returned by