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SOFT SKILLSMODULE DESCRIPTORMODULE DECSRIPTORSYNOPSIS OF MODULEThe module is centred on your learning and development. It aims to help you to become effective, independentand confident self-directed life-long learners by improving your capacity in self-management, critical andreflective thinking, and communication with audience, academic debate, group work, and peer-to-peerinteraction. Learning outcomes: oral and writing communication skills; interpersonal skills; problem-solving skills;organizational skills. The course will be presented in lectures, workshops, trainings. You will produce Portfolio (essay, presentation, mental map etc.), Joint Project, Academic debate,Personal Development Plan. This will enable you to record your personal objectives and evaluate your progress towards the achievementof your goals in personal, professional and career development. The portfolio and joint project will be used to give formative feedback. Summative feedback will bebased on academic debate and personal development plan (PDP). This will facilitate and enhance your life-long learning skills and career perspectives.OUTLINE SYLLABUS1) Introduction to the purpose and process of Soft Skills (10%)2) Learning skills (40%) Self-management (20%) Critical thinking development (10%) Reflective thinking and writing (10%)3) Communication skills (50%) Presentation skills (10%) Academic debate (15%) Group work (15%) Peer-to-peer Interaction (10%)-10-

SOFT SKILLSMODULE DESCRIPTORAIMS OF MODULEThe module content is centred on your learning and development. It seeks to motivate you by helping to becomemore effective, independent and confident self-directed learner by improving your capacity to understand whatyou have learned and how and when you are learning, and to encourage you to monitor, reflect on, evaluate,plan and take responsibility for your learning. In particular, the module aims to develop and enhance: self-management critical and reflective thinking communication skills group work and peer support strategies.LEARNING OUTCOMESYou will be able to: Apply reflective practice to understand your learning processes and articulate and evaluate personalobjectives and motivation Assume responsibility for your learning and self assessment Manage your time prioritising tasks and construct personal strategies for independent learning Communicate clearly and precisely to interested audience in a range of different contexts Consider and respect others’ points of view in offering constructive feedback to others Reflect on and react to, constructive criticism provided by others in order to enhance your learning Work in team or lead the team during implementation of learning tasks Articulate and record personal development plans to make most efficient and effective use of yourlearning experiencesLEARNING AND TEACHING STRATEGYThis module will be delivered using a combination of lectures, workshops and trainings. You will constructa portfolio which will, in the first instance, be used as a repository for seminar exercises, work in progress,reflections on learning, etc. This portfolio will be shared with tutors from the beginning, so that formativefeedback can be given whenever appropriate and your progress monitored.You will be required to produce PDP in order to enhance your life-long learning.-11-

SOFT SKILLSMODULE DESCRIPTORASSESSMENT AND FEEDBACK STRATEGYSUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT AND RATIONALE FOR TASKSThe final assessment which will be a reflective essay backed up by a PDP.A middle point assessment which is an academic debate featuring ‘for’ / ‘against’ and objective observation.The ability to provide evidence on which valid judgments can be made about progress and achievement is oneof the key skills required by university education. A taxonomy developed for the assessment of PDP will beused for summative assessment.The academic debate will offer you a ‘real life’ experience of engaging in a constructive debate whilst beingobserved by the peers and they will assess based on the rigor of your argument, sufficient in-depth subjectknowledge of the topic and your ability to engage in the debate.FORMATIVE ASSESSMENTA portfolio containing evidence of skills, achievements, self-evaluation and self-assessment, with clearlythought-out personal development planning. The basis for assessment will not be solely the quality of thetasks submitted, although that will be taken into consideration. The aim of the portfolio and the learningenvironment provided is to enable you to effectively evaluate your capabilities, to articulate them in responseto the requirements of the learning process, and to provide appropriate and relevant evidence of thesecompetences,you’re your understanding of the relevant legal, ethical and academic issues.Additional Formative assessment is the joint project aiming at team building, organizational and communicativeskills development, and goal achievement.Indication of how you will get feedback and how this will support your learning.Formative feedback will be given periodically during seminars.Indicative reading list or other learningresources.-12-

SOFT SKILLSMODULE DESCRIPTORINDICATIVE READING LIST AND OTHER LEARNINGRESOURCESBlum-Kulka, S. & Dvir-Gvirsman, S. Peer Interaction and Learning. International Encyclopedia ofEducation (Third Edition), 2010, 444-449Brockbank, A., McGill, I. (2007). Facilitating reflective learning in higher education. 2Nd edition.Maidenhead: Open University PressBurns, T. (2012) Essential study skills: the complete guide to success at university. 3-rd edn. London: Sage.Butler, H.A., Dwyer, C.P., Hogan, M.J., Franco, A., Rivas, S.F., Saiz, C, Almeida, L.S. (2012) The HalpernCritical Thinking Assessment and real-world outcomes: Cross-national applications. Thinking Skills andCreativity, 7, 112-121.Chivers B., Shoolbred M., (2007) A Student’s Guide to Presentations Making your Presentation Count,SAGECottrell, S. (2013) The study skills handbook. 4th edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacmillanDeveloping and Assessing Personal and Social Responsibility in College: New Directions for HigherEducation,Number 164 \\ Robert D. Reason (Editor) ISBN: 978-1-118-82805-2 January 2014, Jossey-Bass - 104pagesDrew, S., Bingham, R., (2010) The Guide to Learning and Study Skills: For Higher Education and at Work,GowerFreeley, A., Steinberg, D., (2008) Argumentation and Debate, Cengage LearningGravells, A., Simpson, S. (2010). Planning and Enabling Learning in the Lifelong Learning Sector, SAGEHandbook of motivation science / edited by James Y. Shah, Wendi L. Gardner (2008), New York, TheGuilford Press-13-

SOFT SKILLSMODULE DESCRIPTORLevin, P. (2005) Successful teamwork!: for undergraduates and taught postgraduates working on groupprojects. Maidenhead: Open University Press. (also available as an eBook via the Library Catalogue)Moon, J. (2005) A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning: Theory and Practice, London and NewYork, RoutledgefalmerRybold, G. (2006) Speaking, Listening and Understanding: debate for not native English speakers InternationalDebate Education Association Starkey L. Critical thinking skills success. - NY: LearningExpress, LLC, 2004.– 169 p.Van Emden J., Becker L., (2004) Presentation Skills for Students, Palgrave Macmillan-14-

CHAPTER 1:INTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSIntroductionLearning ObjectivesDefinitionsSoft Skills CategorizingIntegral Parts of Soft SkillsOutcomes of Soft Skills DevelopmentPersonal Developmental Plan (PDP)ActivitiesFurther Reading

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTIONAccording to researches conducted in Harvard and Stanford Universities only 15% of your career success isprovided by your hard skills, whilst other 85% by so called soft skills. “Soft skills get little respect but willmake or break your career” (Peggy Klaus).“Soft Skills” correlates with some terms of a very close meaning: “Life Skills”, “Emotional IntelligenceQuotients”, “Social Skills”, and “Interpersonal Skills”.Soft skills is a term often associated with a person’s Emotional Intelligence Quotient, the cluster of personalitytraits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, managing people, leadership, etc.that characterize relationships with other people. Soft skills, also known as people skills, complement hardskills to enhance an individual’s relationships, job performance and career prospects. It’s often said that hardskills will get you an interview but you need soft skills to get – and keep – the job.Unlike hard skills, which comprise a person’s technical skill set and ability to perform certain functional tasks,soft skills are interpersonal and broadly applicable across job titles and industries. Many soft skills are tiedto individuals’ personalities rather than any formal training, and are thus considered more difficult to developthan hard skills. Soft skills are often described in terms of personality traits, such as optimism, integrity anda sense of humor. These skills are also defined by abilities that can be practiced, such as leadership, empathy,communication and sociability.Soft skills could be defined as life skills which are behaviors used appropriately and responsibly in themanagement of personal affairs. They are a set of human skills acquired via teaching or direct experiencethat are used to handle problems and questions commonly encountered in daily human life. The subjectvaries greatly depending on social norms and community expectations. Life skills have been defined by theWorld Health Organization (WHO) as “abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals todeal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life”. They represent the psycho-social skillsthat determine valued behavior and include reflective skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking, topersonal skills such as self-awareness, and to interpersonal skills. Practicing life skills leads to qualities suchas self-esteem, sociability and tolerance, to action competencies to take action and generate change, and tocapabilities to have the freedom to decide what to do and who to be.Life Skills-Based Education has a long history of supporting human development. Life skills-based educationis now recognized as a methodology to address a variety of issues of youth development and thematic responsesincluding as expressed in World Youth Report (2003), World Program for Human Rights Education (2004),-16-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSUN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development (2005), the World Development Report (2007), andso on. Expected learning outcomes include a combination of knowledge, values, attitudes and skills with aparticular emphasis on those skills that related to critical thinking and problem solving, self-management andcommunication and inter-personal skills.Social skills are any skills facilitating interaction and communication with others. Social rules and relationsare created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways. The process of learning these skills iscalled socialization.Interpersonal skills are sometimes also referred to as people skills or communication skills. Interpersonalskills are the skills a person uses to communicate and interact with others. They include persuasion, activelistening, delegation, and leadership. The term “interpersonal skills” is used often in business contexts to referto the measure of a person’s ability to operate within business organizations through social communicationand interactions. Interpersonal skills are how people relate to one another.WHY SOFT SKILLS? Self - An awareness of the characteristics that define the person one is and wants to become. Opportunity - An awareness of the possibilities that exist, the demands they make and the rewards andsatisfactions they offer. Aspirations - The ability to make realistic choices and plans based on sound information and on self–opportunity alignment. Results - The ability to review outcomes, plan and take action to implement decisions and aspirations,especially at points of transition (Kumar, A., 2007).In order to SOAR students need two things:Academic Roots Discipline based knowledge and understandingAcademic Wings The ability to enhance that knowledge and understanding with awareness (self and others), criticalthinking, reflective practice.-17-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSThe specificity of Soft Skills Discipline specific Placement / employability preparation Lifelong learners– Learning how to learn– Reflective practitionersFig. 1. Soft SkillsSoft skills focus more on people than processes. Today’s service economy and ascendance of work teams inlarge organizations puts a new premium on people skills and relationship-building (Kocon, L.).Soft skills People skills Street Smarts-18-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSLEARNING OBJECTIVESThe module content is centered on students’ learning and development. It seeks to motivate students by helpingthem to be more effective, independent and confident self-directed learners by improving their capacity tounderstand what they have learned, how and when they are learning, and to encourage them to monitor, reflecton, evaluate, plan and take responsibility for their own learning.The Main tasks of the Soft Skills module are to develop and enhance: Critical and reflective thinking; Self-management and self awareness skills; Communication skills, including interpretation and use of feedback; Team working and peer support strategies.DEFINITIONS“What exactly are soft skills?” This basic question is not easy to answer, because the perception of what is asoft skill differs from context to context. A subject may be considered a soft skill in one particular area, andmay be considered a hard skill in another. On top of it the understanding of what should be recognized as asoft skill varies widely.Generally, soft skills may be subdivided into three basic categories:1.Personal qualities2.Interpersonal skills3.Additional skills/knowledgeSoft Skills:Critical thinkingListening to othersReflective PracticeGroup Work / working with othersCV and ApplicationsSelf assessmentProfessional practiceAssertivenessCreative problem solvingMentoring and peer supportInformation LiteracyDigital LiteracyPortfolio management(tools for delivery, recording and reflection)-19-Communication Skills

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSSoft skills complement hard skills to enhance an individual’s relationships, job performance and careerprospects. Unlike hard skills, which tend to be specific to a certain type of task or activity, soft skills arebroadly applicable.While your technical skills may get your foot in the door, your people skills are what open most of the doorsto come. Your work ethic, your attitude, your communication skills, your emotional intelligence and a wholehost of other personal attributes are the soft skills that are crucial for career success.Soft skills are often broken down into categories, or types of skills according to the level of complexity andinteraction. An example of one way of categorizing social skills can be found in the table below:SOFT SKILLS CATEGORIZINGSkill SetFoundation SkillsInteraction SkillsAffective SkillsCognitive SkillsUsed forExamplesAbility to maintain eye contact, maintainBasic social interactionappropriate personal space, understand gesturesand facial expressionsResolving conflicts, taking turns, learning howto begin and end conversations, determiningSkills needed to interact with othersappropriate topics for conversation, interactingwith authority figuresIdentifying one’s feelings, recognizing theSkills needed for understanding feelings of others, demonstrating empathy,oneself and othersdecoding body language and facial expressions,determining whether someone is trustworthySocial perception, making choices, selfSkills needed to maintain more monitoring, understanding community norms,complex social interactionsdetermining appropriate behavior for differentsocial situations.Table 1. (Canney and Byrne, 2006)-20-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSFigure 2. Soft Skills DifferentiationFigure 3. Soft Skills and OutcomesSelf-awareness includes identifying knowledge gaps, taking responsibility for own learning and development,understanding the impacts of self-efficacy, dealing with pressures and emotions, reflective practice, professionaldevelopment and current awareness.-21-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSThe mentioned skills assist students in understanding the learning process and constructing their own Selvesin academic and professional activities. They become apparent in Surface / deep / strategic learning Self-efficacy Requires reconstruction of known events in their own lives Constructing a self-MAP Motivation Ability PersonalityINTEGRAL PARTS OF SOFT SKILLSI. Self-Management System consists of Self-motivation, taking responsibility, task setting/prioritizing, timemanagement. The structure of Self-Management System is detected in the Table below.Figure 4. Self-Management Structure-22-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSII. Critical Thinking: «thinking about thinking» (Raiskums, B. W.) «this way of thinking, which does not accept the arguments and conclusions blindly, rather, it examinesassumptions, recognize hidden values, evaluates the data and conclusions» (Mayers, D.) «reasonable reflective thinking, aimed at deciding what to trust and what to do» (Ennis, R.) “An expert is a man (woman) who has made all of the mistakes which can be made in a very narrowfield” (Bohr, N.) “Imagination is more important than knowledge” (Einstein, A.) Critical thinking is the ability to question and to cope with uncertainty, without which none of the abovewould be possible.Critical Thinking Characteristics include logic; imagination; risk; “accepting nothing, questioning everything”,reaching your own conclusion; being prepared to change that conclusion in the light of emerging evidence;“The world was flat until we discovered it wasn’t.at the minute we believe it’s a sphere.”.Example of Critical Thinking: Experimentation (lab / hypothesis testing) Social research Data interpretation and explanation Creative problem solving Identify the issue Come up with alternative solutions Learning to cope with uncertainty and embracing it as a learning tool (Pickard, A., 2010).III. Reflection is a form of thinking used to fulfill a purpose or to achieve some anticipated outcome and islargely based on the further processing of knowledge and understanding that we already possess.Fig. 5. Reflective Practice Circle-23-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSReflective Practice is triggered with the help of Self assessment questions: What am I trying to do exactly? Why am I doing it? What went well and why? What went less well and why? How could I do better next time? (Shenton, A., 2012)Figure 6. Reflective Practice (Kolb, 1984; Carr & Kemmis, 1986)Another scheme of reflective practice consists of 1) the reflective diary; 2) description; 3) interpretation; 4)outcome which involves hard systematic thinking and soft insight, intuition and tacit knowledge leading to aplan of action based on critical evaluation of all the available evidence.IV. Communication and InteractionFigure 7. Effective Communication-24-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSEffective communication provides for high level ofPresentation skills: to increase both skills and confidence levels to improve research, design and communication skills to develop team working and project management skills to strengthen learning and enthusiasm for further knowledge to promote critical and analytical thinkingAcademic debates: Content and formats of academic debate Listening skills Giving and receiving feedback Reacting to grounded criticismand effective writing and listening:Figure 8. Skillful Writing-25-

SOFT SKILLSINTRODUCTION TO SOFT SKILLSSkillful writing examples: Technical Writing Script writing / audience analysis / performance / reflection Observation (self and ot

may be considered a hard skill in another. On top of it the understanding of what should be recognised as a soft skill varies widely. Knowledge in project management for instance is "nice to have" for an electrical engineer, but it is a "must to have" for a civil engineer. Training in cultural awareness might be useful for a chemist, but