Smart skills – Roundtable 39 – Brain Leaders And Learners

Expect agility to follow when we combine hard and soft skills to lead change for the 21st Century.

Agile learners develop smart skills to build flexible and resourceful communities, where problems get solved and people find support. It’s more than hard or soft skills, yet it builds a learning community to integrate and hone both. Add to that the fact that smart skills bring agile results that leaders and learners can observe and track.

What’s So Smart About Agility Skills?

Students’ brains come equipped with agile tools to solve real world issues. Simply integrate traditional hard and soft skills, and agility follows. How so? Let’s say you respect a debate opponent by using good tone soft skills. Now imagine that you hit scientific facts with stellar hard skills to build an engineering innovation, for example, that jumps counterpoint into action. Or simply toss ethical discussions into a lesson activity related to the creation of an atomic bomb, for instance, and students use more than hard skills and more than soft skills to learn.

Have you noticed that traditionally isolated skills rarely work well in agile settings? Yet together these combined or smart skills, build resourceful 21st Century solutions by integrating and using learners’ unique capabilities. Students start by surveying their multiple intelligences

Change works best when you combine and develop skills that increase intelligences, and fuel curiosity. Smart skills – or integrated hard and soft skills – motivate people of different strengths to step up to the plate together and contribute. Sound like an agile extension for team building too?

How Do You Track and Observe Smart Skills at Work?

My class develops 21st Century skills from a chart of 50 integrated skills that combine both hard and soft. These integrated or smart skills equip students to actively engage and apply content we are learning at any time. The students love to chart their own progress by stating evidence of each smart skill used in class that day.

Looking to learn more in less time? You can find video of award winning smart skills charted at my TPT site. Or you can create your own set of 21st Century skills – that allow students to actively engage in your topics – by developing and using more of their unique capabilities as agile learners.

Do be sure to pose two footed questions beside each skill (see example above) in order to challenge students to illustrate evidence of smart skills used.

Related tool: Yearly planner with brain boosters and prompts to reboot your brain so that you tap and develop hidden and unused capabilities.

Created by Ellen Weber, Brain Based Tasks for Growth Mindset