Soft Skills

Encourage Learning

Purpose

Delivering a course where students are motivated and engaged requires you to have comprehensive interpersonal skills that foster positive interactions. Soft skills are a cluster of communication, personality traits, language, optimism, professionalism and friendliness that describe your interactions with students.

Why enhance soft skills?

Delivering a course where students are motivated and engaged requires the educator to have comprehensive interpersonal skills (soft skills) that foster positive interactions. Soft skills include communication, personality traits, social cues, work ethic, teamwork, decision making, optimism, motivation, professionalism and conflict resolution etc. All these skills characterise how a person interacts with others (Doyle, 2017).

Enhancing your soft skills will show students that you are interested in them and that you genuinely care about them succeeding in your course. This will motivate your students to be more inspired and engaged to participate actively in their learning.

Learning Context

Strategies for soft skills

Be compassionate and understanding
Be inclusive of all students; every student needs to feel acknowledged and part of the student cohort
Guide students through the course, for example, critical timelines about assessments, weekly content, participating in discussions, timely feedback
Make challenging components of your course achievable by acknowledging that there are difficult parts in the course. Support students on how to work through these components of the course.
Know what motivates your students by finding out about them. Introductions at the start of the course are effective for this purpose. Ask students to post about why they are enrolled in the course, find out about their aspirations, their career goals, interests, hobbies, etc.
Be positive in all your communications with all students, as a cohort, as a group, as assessment teams, and as individuals
Provide students with feedback that is positive and encouraging. Include areas they need to improve in a positive and encouraging tone
Support students who may appear to be disengaged by emailing them individually indicating that you have noticed their lack of attendance and to communicate with you about any issues this student may have