2014-03-12-Soft Skills 2
Seminars@Hadley
Soft Skills: The Missing Link
in Contemporary Education Curricula
Part II
Presented by
Robert Schulenburg
Caleb van den Cline
Moderated by
Colleen Wunderlich
March 12, 2014
Colleen Wunderlich
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley, my name is Colleen Wunderlich and I’m the director of the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship and Employment here at Hadley. And today’s seminar topic is staff skills The Missing Link in Contemporary Education Part Two.
Your presenters are Caleb van den Cline and Robert Schulenburg and for those of you who could not join us last week I’d like to take a moment and just tell you a little bit about our speakers. Caleb van den Cline is the Manager of Employment Services at Lions Center for the Blind in Oakland, California. He holds a Master’s Degree in Special Education with emphasis on visualimpairment at San Francisco State University and is a Certified Mobility Specialist. His work focuses on research and teaching strategies related to cyclic and endemic issues of poverty and education access and social equity within the blind and low vision communities out in the San Francisco Bay Area
Robert Schulenburg has nine years of teaching experience at the Arizona School for the Blind. He has designed transition programs in Arizona and California, both workshops and residential models, and he has served as a Peace Corps volunteer with his primary focus on Special Education, policy and disability awareness. Robert serves as a consultant for small business and disability advocacy groups in various other countries. He works as a Program Manager for Junior Blind designing and implementing transition workshops for blind youth in Central and Northern California.
With that I will be handing the microphone over to our speakers and of course at the conclusion of the presentation we will open this up for questions. So let me welcome today’s speakers, Caleb and Robert.
Robert Schulenburg
Good Afternoon everybody, this is Rob Schulenburg talking and I’m here with Caleb can den Cline.
Caleb can den Cline
Hello everyone!
Robert Schulenburg
And we’re pleased to be here for part two of our webinar on soft skills. I’d like to begin today by sharing a story with you; I don’t think Caleb has heard this one yet. But, it was told to me by a mentor of mine a few years back who described a trip he took to a national convention for people, who are visually impaired, he himself being a man who is a cane user, totally blind. And one day during the convention he decides to leave the hotel and got directions to a great restaurant, he’s on his way out to dinner, and he stopped at the light. He’s waiting for the light and he’s waiting for the light, new city, busy traffic, and he’s not quite sure of the traffic light but he knows that there is somebody there with him.
And he turns to the guy waiting with him at the intersection, and hears the traffic says, “Is it good to go?” and the guy says, “Yup, let’s go,” and they take off into the street and immediately horns start honking and cars start screeching to a halt and my mentor says to the guy on the street with him, “What are you doing? It’s a red light!” And the guy said, “I didn’t know it was a red light?” “Then why did you go?” and he says, “What do you mean why did I go, I’m blind,” and the other guy says, “What do you mean? I’m blind,” so there they are two blind men in the middle of traffic both relying on the other to get them across the street.
And the moral of the story here is, yeah, thank you for chuckling Caleb, the moral of the story here is that you cannot by definition expect the unexpected. And so all of these things being equal with years of travel experience and years of skills and strategies under his belt, you never know when life is going to throw you a curve ball, but the best that we can do is make ourselves prepared for every contingency that we can expect and prepare for, and that’s part of what we are doing here today by addressing this issue of soft skills.
Caleb can den Cline
Yeah; so thanks Rob definitely a good anecdote, and definitely relevant too. Why don’t we go to the first slide because what I want to do first is just quickly go over some of the review of the first conversation that we had last week and start with just a look at some of the problems that we saw when we first put together soft skills we started with the problem, and the problem being here I have a couple of graphs. Employment rates for people with disabilities is in decline, it’s been in decline for a little while, it’s redoubled especially with the recession, and even though the economy is improving now, it’s not improving for people with disabilities, so that’s definitely a big concern for Rob and especially for myself working in an employment program.
Additionally something that we didn’t speak to other than in passing with the last class last week, we see out here in California anyway is recidivism issues within the Department of Rehab and what that is is a cycle of individuals who apply for DR services as they should, they receive training as they should, they are on a vocational track and they receive employment services, they land a job and we count that as great, we’ve been successful the person has a job and now can go into the adult world, and then there’s a loss of job or a change of job or life happens and the person comes back to DR for the same cycle again. Not that that’s inherently bad in and of itself, but often times what’s happening, what we’re seeing anecdotally here in California is that none of the lessons along the cycle through DoR are instructing a generalized skill of teaching somebody how to get a job for themselves.
So there are a lot of people that go through the system over and over. Let’s go to the next slide, that led us to ask some questions to employers, and some of the information that we got back from employers, we asked them, “What do you need and what skill gaps are you seeing out of people that apply to your jobs?” and what they said is, “Well, most of the people who are applying don’t really have social skills that we are looking for, there’s something odd going on, they don’t have solid workplace behaviors and values, so I don’t really want to hire them. And number three I don’t see the basic skills there just to get the essentials of the job done and basic skills refers to things that someone might learn in secondary school, Math, Language, Punctuation, Spelling, all those sorts of things.”
That also led us to wonder well what’s the expectation of not just the employers but everybody in the community, the person with the disability, the network of family and friends and professionals, and we reviewed a study that happened at the end of last year asking, “Do you think society expects you to work?” and more than half said, “No, I don’t think society actually even expects me to work in the first place,” matter of fact only about a quarter, 28% said yes to that question which was quite shocking.
Let’s go to the next slide. And we reviewed a discussion that[Sarah Triano] presented here at the California Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Here in California we have a committee that works at the state level thinking about how to help people with disabilities get into the workforce and become the successful partners inherently with everybody, all the other individuals working in California. And something that she sighted was that two point two million people with disabilities are not employed or looking for a job in California, this is in December of last year. And she said that studies have shown that on average 20% of them can work and they want to work, but they don’t work for fear of losing health insurance and Medicaid type of benefits. There are some inconsistencies there. We were asking her, “Why is this important for us as teachers in elementary and secondary school, maybe working after that with adults beyond just the social justice, justice aspects of everybody having an opportunity to work and be successful in their life?”
Well there’s actually a financial aspect to it as well, because if you take the average monthly social security payments here in California, it $866.40, if you take that and you multiply it by that 20 percent of the disability beneficiaries, that’s three hundred twenty thousand people here in California, that’s over three billion dollars a year. But California is spending to support the outdated misperception that people with disabilities can’t work because of their disabilities.
Robert Schulenburg
Well it’s California and the federal government that give the social, SSI.
Caleb van den Cline
SSI is the beneficiaries, but the number scale, the two point two million, we’re talking about Californians.
Robert Schulenburg
Right
Caleb van den Cline
So the 20% there. So, we can go to the next slide here to continue crashing through some of what we talked about last week. Rob and I said, “Well, how do we actually attend to these various problems, is there a solution that we can devise?” And the common thread across what employeers need, across addressing the needs of the community in terms of employment, allowing DOR to reach the larger number of individuals than they are currently by breaking that recidivism cycle is soft skills. And we asked, “What are soft skills?” because it’s really a squishy idea and everybody has their own particular definition of it. So Rob started doing a whole lot of research and analysis on what involves soft skills and he started to build this model. Do you actually want to walk us through that really quickly here?
Robert Schulenburg
Yeah, real quickly because what we’re finding is that there’s a lot of definitions of soft skills, some of the definitions included what we’ll discuss as hard skills, some of the definitions were not relevant to employment, some of the definitions were specific to emotional or social skills only, but we thought identify the soft skills as they apply to the workplace employability that there’s actually four major groups which we would call domains, and those are critical thinking, social rapport, work ethic and collaboration.
And the reason we have zone of control up here is that we drew a circle to position our domains on or near as we get to the point where we’re ready to discuss their inter-relationship because we did see an inter-relationship between these domains, but beginning with the individual we want to also acknowledge and anticipate for purposes of instruction that if we had a couple of things that we know the person can completely be in control of, and those would be critical thinking and work ethic as domains.
But we also have to acknowledge that the outcomes of behaviors in social rapport and collaboration are also going to be contingent upon the responses of others. And so those are outside the zone of control the individual meaning, they can do everything as they were trained, and everything as they can predict should be done, and yet the outcomes may not be as desired because the outcomes are slightly out of the control of the individual exercising the skill. So we want to just make sure that’s clear so you know that’s why it says zone of control at the top of the slide.
Caleb van den Cline
We didn’t miss putting the stars on the circle there.
Robert Schulenburg
Right.
Caleb van den Cline
On the diagram.
Robert Schulenburg
Exactly, so that is on purpose, we can push to the next slide now and we’ll start populating some concepts within this diagram. So, under Critical Thinking we have some major categories that were coming up that we’re able to cluster ideas within, and you could call those sub-domains, these could be constituent skills themselves or as you see down the road they could just be cluster group or sub-domains.
But looking at Critical Thinking we found these ideas coming up over and over again, that there were skills related to common sense, skills related to time management, and skills related to problem solving. And common sense here, it’s seems like that’s undefinable, but really it just has to do with the ability to make predictions and evaluations based on a common experience for societal norms. And so, a lot of these things, we didn’t put anything on this diagram that we couldn’t go to Webster’s Dictionary or Dictionary.com and generate an applicable definition out of.
And so not to belabor this but to move on to the next slide. Don’t be scared when you see the next slide. And, it’s going to be coming up any second , here it comes. Do not be alarmed, there’s a lot of text on this screen and this is because we are reflecting in this slide all of the data points, or all the ones that would fit that we generated into the data analysis after excluding hard skills and clustering data points, we still came up with a lot of information that would fit within these four categories. Caleb would you like to highlight anything in particular?
Caleb van den Cline
Yeah, so we didn’t present this level of intricate detail last week and we’re not going to spend too much time this time around. We just want to demonstrate that there’s a lot of skills that fall under the variouscategories. When we instituted this into the presentation some individuals that are looking for some more specifics down the road, maybe when you’re applying this in your actual teaching capacity or the professional capacity, might be able to use as a reference point, these groups of pasts are not reflective of everything that’s out there. But we would argue that if you do some research into what soft skills are or you find that you need to teach a student of yours for instance something that you’re not sure if it falls underneath a category, we anticipate that you’ll find that whatever you’re searching for will fit under one of the primary four domains and even under a secondary domain. So we want to connect this because we’ll actually give you more of a sense of the level of detail that we’ve gone into and how it related to our students. And then also recognize that this is not exclusive, if we look under the Work Domain for example…
Robert Schulenburg
Really small text.
Caleb van den Cline
It’s really small text but under the Work Ethic domain there’s a sub-category of presence and I’m going to talk about this more in a little bit, but right now we just have one constituents skill, it says consistently on time, and so this presence has to do with not so much with your ability to be the center of attention as much as the fact gracefully entering the room on time.
Robert Schulenburg
Exactly, are you a bear? And we could have even split the hairs on this based on the meta analysis even more. Employers value under the category or said domain of presence that not only are you there every day, but that you’re on time, and that you’re on time every day, and all those three we just sort of lumped into the idea of being consistently on time. Yogi Bear said, “90 % of life is just showing up,” and so that could really be broken down or taken generally, and so we wanted to just use that as an example of the flexibility of this model. And we can move on to the next slide now I think.
Caleb van den Cline
Yeah, and what we’ll do is we’ll actually pull it back to a more simplistic presentation that we provided to everybody last week because this is what we’ll work off of when we’re talking about how to apply this model in curriculum.
Robert Schulenburg
Okay, so with this conceptual model we’re back down to these sort of sub-domains, and what we’ve done here is we’ve added arrows to the conceptual model because not only do we have our domains and we know where they fall within our client’s zone of control but we’re also looking at inter-relationship. If we look at Critical Thinking as an apex or fountain head of all these skills, we’ll see that the ability to problem solve, time management, common sense, these things create experiences, they create a context for how the responses and behaviors will be out-putted by the individual, and they’re going to initially manifest in the behaviors that reflect the skills related to the value of work, which we call work ethic, and also the ability to be liked and trusted, which we call Social Rapport, so then from Critical Thinking, we move in two different directions, and it’s a reciprocal relationship.