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Classful

While teachers provide and impart invaluable skills to middle schoolers based on the standards we’re provided with.

sometimes it’s worth going above and beyond the curriculum to gain those additional life skills. While it’s valuable to students to have an academic basis for learning and developing further, it’s just as key that they have those soft skills to ensure they can succeed beyond their tests and exams.

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What soft skills are a must for middle schoolers?

Here are just a few:

  • Monotasking
  • Personal Study Preferences
  • Metacognition
  • Prioritization
  • Playing to Strengths
  • Learning for Pleasure

Read on for more about these specific soft skills and why they’re a must to help your students to succeed later in life:

Monotasking

Also known as unitasking, monotasking is the discipline in which children can focus solely on one task without distractions or blips. This skill is especially vital for children in a world where everything needs a constant connection. It allows them to concentrate on what needs to be done without distraction from outside sources, including social media. The Pomodoro Technique is an excellent way to introduce this concept to children, allowing them to work interruption-free through specific guidelines and providing them breaks in study to make them more productive students. Providing that discipline can go a long way towards helping middle-schoolers understand when the complete focus is necessary, an invaluable tool in the modern world.

Personal Study Preferences

No two children are the same. As such, not all of your students will be able to process and use the information and complete tasks the same way as others. Instead of forcing children to follow strict rules regarding their studies, grant your middle schoolers the freedom to study how works best for them.

Some children need to write everything down to remember it, while others require visual cues to better process information. Offering greater freedom to find how they best study can help even frustrated students find a way to enjoy learning and provide them with vital skills for later in life. One way to implement this could be to include study time in the classroom that’s a little less controlled, allowing students to learn how they learn best.

Metacognition

While the word might look intimidating, meta-cognition is anything but. Even adults can struggle with reading comprehension occasionally, finding that, while they’ve certainly read everything in a paragraph, they haven’t taken in the meaning or understanding of the text.

The same concept applies to children, especially when it comes to middle-schoolers who are reading based on your requirement. To allow students better success, they must be able to read and understand and visualize what they are reading. This is particularly important for non-fiction writing, where understanding and figuring out meaning can be more complicated than most.

Prioritization

Another concept that many adults still struggle with, prioritization is a way to cut through procrastination to what matters in the classroom. Productivity alone isn’t always necessary to succeed if you’re productive with the wrong subject matter. For example, a class asked to create a slideshow based on research may spend hours designing their presentation and hardly any time on actual research. But because they are technically working on the project, they believe they are productive. Providing your middle schoolers with the guidance to focus on the essential parts of the project first, even if challenging, can offer an excellent foundation for future projects. One easy and practical way to implement this is to provide a checklist for use with projects in order of prioritization to help your students learn what should come first.

Playing to Strengths

As an environment that provides highly standardized education, the concept of playing to your student’s strengths doesn’t seem to fit into the requirements of a classroom. But by offering ways students can play to their strengths, even in small ways, you can encourage them to do the things they enjoy and are good at without sacrificing their learning requirements.

For example, in a group where half the students are good readers but don’t enjoy writing, and the other half is the opposite, allowing them to play to their strengths by either answering questions on paper or reading aloud is a good compromise.

Learning for Pleasure

Teaching students that learning isn’t just about getting good grades, and can be enjoyable, is one of the most vital things a teacher can provide. Encouraging reading and writing in specific subjects of interest makes it possible to promote those tasks as enjoyable and things that can even be performed independently.

For children who enjoy dinosaurs, provide them with books on the subject. For those who love mystical creatures, encourage them to write their own fairy-tale stories in their own time. Learning for pleasure is a soft skill that can certainly pay off for students, motivating them to succeed and take their learning beyond the classroom.