How to train soft skills? Get inspired by popular education methods and collective intelligence approach!
The soft skill brings together a set of behaviours, aptitudes, attitudes and state of mind. Training these soft skills can not involve traditional pedagogical approaches: it is not a question of capitalizing knowledge, or training technical skills. It has to encourage social and behavioural change, individually and, most of all, collectively.
For this, we propose a participatory and interactive pedagogical approach, inspired by methods of popular education and collective intelligence. This should permit to release creativity, promote self-confidence, encourage interaction and cooperation among people, or to exchange and share values in order to develop empathy, open-mindedness and encourage the emergence of an individual and collective vision.
Popular education is a practice that aims to disseminate and share knowledge, as well as to develop the abilities of individuals to live in society. It is a process of collective and participatory learning which aims to transform the relationships to knowledge, others and the society. It should contribute to individual emancipation and collective empowerment.
Collective Intelligence approach is a practice of organizational management. It postulates that if a group of individuals, linked by a common project, shares knowledge, skills and experiences it will improve the overall performance of a team, a company or a community. It is based on horizontal management and cooperation.
This is how we designed our digital training notebook, bringing together a panel of games, activities and workshops to develop the main soft skills targeted by the RE.MIND project. The tools are classified into different level categories (elementary, intermediate or advanced), so it can be implemented whether as part of a one-off experiment or as part of a more in-depth activity.
For each tool, you will dispose of a complete pedagogical sheet, gathering all the elements that you will need as a teacher or a manager to test the tool in your classroom or enterprise!
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them. 2021-1-NO01-KA220-VET-000033203