Ladies & gents, my name is Brandon Stover, and I’m the founder of Plato University. Welcome to Theory into Action.
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Our job as educators should be to prepare students with the ability to adapt to the ever evolving world, job market, and self.
At Plato University, we have students master foundational skills to help students become highly effective in the 21st century across any context or problem.
A Gallup report called Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work: The Role of Higher Education, spoke with 2,000 college graduates, 600 hiring managers and 1,000 parents.
The report suggested that learners who combine a human skills foundation with key hard skills avoid underemployment and job loss due to automation, and in many cases their performance outpaces learners from more occupation-oriented programs.
When employers were surveyed, the most important parts of a learner’s education were:
Additionally, the study measured the extent to which college graduates seek and find purpose in their work, suggesting a final foundational skill would be character building, or a focus on developing ones self and purpose in life.
So the 5 must have skills are critical thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, & character building.
Let's discuss each one, why student's need it, and how you can help students develop these skills and design it into your courses.
Critical thinking involves analyzing, evaluating, and knowing when to apply data, knowledge, or a particular skill set.
Critical thinking also entails fully understanding a problem from each angle, knowing the amount of uncertainty in the situation, and all the factors that could affect the outcomes of making an effective decision.
Simply, a problem occurs in the world, you need to be able to intake information about that problem, understand the knowns and unknowns, separate signal from noise, and contextualize the problem in the systems its embedded in.
Why is critical thinking important for students?
Critical thinking is required now more than ever with the amount of information, decisions, and global problems our world faces today.
Without critical thinking, a student’s decision making and problem solving abilities will be very poor, leading to worse outcomes personally and professionally. At the end of the day, employers hire people to solve problems in their business.
Additionally, if students are not able to think critically on their own, they rely on other more critical thinkers who may not have their best interests at heart. In the most extreme sense, they can control your decisions and lead to totalitarian states.
One of the best ways to teach critical thinking to students is by putting it into the context of a problem they care about. For example, climate change. Then lead them through the process of practicing critical thinking, supplying them with resources to aid the process along the way.
To help students develop critical thinking:
First have them analyze the problem.
Next help them to understand and evaluate the information they have gathered.
Then help them to analyze the arguments effectively by
Once they understand the information well, help them to be able to now apply that information to a new context, the ultimate demonstration of understanding.
Finally, to round out critical thinking, teach them how to use the information to make effective decisions.
It is not enough to think critically and come up with brilliant solutions to problems. One also must be able to communicate the result of that thinking to others and be able to persuade them of its merit, using any and all modes of communication that best fit the situation.
Communication is the process of taking a thought or idea in your mind, and transmitting that idea to other minds.
Why is communication important for students?
If students are unable to communicate their ideas to others they will never be able to work in a team, portray a vision or goals, sell themselves or their creations, or make the impact they wish to have in the world.
To help your students develop communication skills, give them multiple opportunities to speak, write, or showcase their work or what is important to them.
3 ways to help students develop communication skills:
Projects: I recommend having your students do projects demonstrating the skills they are learning and present at each stage of their project from ideation to final project.
Standups: A tool used in startups to keep a pulse on where team members are in their work. Usually done once per week, you can have students record a short 2-5 min video sharing their goals, and what they did towards those goals that week, and where they could use help. Then have other students give feedback:
Groups: Where students get together to practice emotional and social intelligence while supporting one another.
In each of these tools, students are practicing:
Critical thinking was the ability to understand, analyze, and evaluate information and knowledge and then know when to correctly apply it.
Creative thinking uses these skills as a foundation to synthesize and produce something new or original, often in pursuit of your mission or problem you would like to solve.
Creative thinking is a marriage between science and art to create solutions that effectively solve problems while simultaneously enriching the culture. It is the practice of combining or rearranging two or more unlikely things in new and useful ways.
Simply stated, creativity is based on facilitated discovery, generating solutions to problems, and creating something new.
Why is creativity important for students to learn?
For any problem in the students life or culture in which they reside, creativity is necessary in order to create solutions. The more difficult a problem, the higher level of creativity is required to solve it.
Any creative person knows that having absolute freedom to create anything is actually overwhelming and leads to nothing. However, having a certain set of rules or guidelines to push up against, bend, or break is what actually helps creativity to thrive.
To help students develop critical thinking:
To start the process, help your students understand how the scientific method applies to their problems or projects. This will provide a structure for them to change variables in creative ways and illicit new outcomes.
Next, help them walk through problem solving methods like design thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) in order to give them ways to address problems with a multitude of solutions
Once they have learned processes for making creativity happen, help them understand the importance of a creative practice, working creativity like a muscle. Examples may be:
Then help them understand how to decide between solutions. Have them look for:
Help them learn the landscape of tools they have available to them for creating products, processes, and services to scale solutions. For example:
Finally help them understand how creative solutions impact others. What effect and 2nd, 3rd, and fourth order consequences their will solution have?
Collaboration means working with other people in order to achieve a shared goal.
The human species has evolved to thrive in complex social systems from the age of tribes to entire communities, organizations, and governments.
In order to accomplish any goal, one must learn how to effectively interact with others. This is true at the scale of intimate relationships to entire world organizations.
Each of these relationships exist within a complex social system where the behavior of interdependent individuals can not be isolated and are instead aggregated to realize the collective behavior we call culture or society. In this relationship, individuals affect the collective and the collective affects the individual.
Why is collaboration important for students to learn?
It is crucial for students to see themselves as not just a mere cogs in a system but rather as agents whose behaviors and initiatives have the power to influence these systems.
So collaboration starts at the world level and drills down to individuals in this system, understanding how to influence both individual members of a system and the system as whole as well.
Students must learn how to step up as a leader, but also how to effectively be a team member, and how to distinguish between when one is required to reach an agreed upon goal.
It is helpful to also help students gain deep knowledge about themselves and how to relate and navigate this understanding with others.
To help students develop collaboration skills:
Our fifth foundational skill, Character Building, prepares students for navigating the real world, both in the workplace and their personal and interpersonal lives. The focus is helping to create fully actualized individuals who have practical life skills and cognitive tools for achieving whatever goals they have set for themselves in the future.
In ancient Greece, students would learn virtues alongside their studies of practical skills in an effort to understand and live a life of moral character. It was a lifelong pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Why is character building important for students to learn?
Somewhere along the way, most likely during the time when we separated religion from education, we lost the focus of developing one's character.
While we have increased our ability to learn practical skills, we've lost our ability to know when or why to apply those skills.
Having character means you know how to set an honorable goal, in service of you and other people, and realizing that the means to reaching that goal are just as important as the goal itself.
HOW and WHY you do something is just as important as WHAT you do.
But if students don't develop their character, they become lost with no direction, no guidance, and struggle to make some of the biggest decisions of their life.
There is a reason the "self-help" genre is one of the largest sector of books and people fall prey to cults and ideological thinking. They are starving for any semblance of a moral compass, rules and virtues to live by, to navigate this messy existence we call life.
To help students develop character building skills:
At Plato University, part of our mission is to help students develop purpose, choosing a worthy pursuit in solving large problems that are meaningful to them and consequential to others.
Deciding where and how to integrate these foundational skills into your course can be difficult. However, they are crucial for your students success.
So use the link below and let's schedule a free call together.
I'll help you work through your ideas and develop a strategy for your course. No hard sells, if you'd like my help implementing that strategy, I'd be happy to do so. Otherwise your free to take that plan and run with. What I care is that either way we are helping your students succeed.
So use the link below and let me help you to turn your wisdom into actionable education.
Let's build something great together.
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