In our tech-driven world, the value of human connection can’t be overstated. While mastering technical skills is indispensable, students must also develop tender skills like communication, collaboration and critical thinking to thrive beyond the classroom. But as pressures to deliver future-focused curricula grow, how can educators ensure that students build these crucial life skills alongside their technical expertise?
To explore the role of tender skills in student success and how they can be nurtured in schools, EdSurge sat down with Patrick Keeney, Senior Director of Product Management and Partnerships for Career and Technical Education (CTE) at McGraw Hill School. As the workforce continues to shift, Keeney argues, equipping students with tender skills that can adapt to any career path is more crucial than ever.
Patrick Keeney
Senior Director of Product Management and Partnerships for CTE, McGraw Hill School
EdSurge: How do you define tender skills? Are there established standards for tender skills in education?
Keeney: People take pride in their technical skills and like to showcase them as competitive differentiators in our careers. In contrast, tender skills are not specialized; they are the everyday skills we need to be successful and contribute to our communities, such as communication, problem-solving, collaboration and empathy — all crucial.
We see tender skills mentioned in national and state standards related to career education, as well as in typical school district policies. For instance, students are expected to show up on time and behave appropriately — these are tender skills.
While tender skills are addressed on a cursory level, they’re not emphasized as critically crucial for students’ future roles and identities, especially compared to technical skills. Social and emotional learning, a near cousin to tender skills, is critical but not necessarily career-related. The two skill sets intersect but aren’t identical.
As a result, there’s a significant gap between students’ tender skill attainment as they leave high school and what’s needed to be successful in the workforce and as joyful contributors to society.
Why is Career and Technical Education particularly well-suited for developing tender skills?
In the United States, addressing socioeconomic challenges is critical, and one of the most valuable solutions is ensuring that every high school graduate has a sense of their next step, whether it’s college, the workforce or military service. Millions of medium and high-paying jobs go unfilled due to a lack of properly skilled workers, while people living in poverty could potentially fill these roles. The increased emphasis on and funding for career education to address these challenges is perhaps the most crucial academic movement we can undertake.
There’s a significant gap between students’ tender skill attainment as they leave high school and what’s needed to be successful in the workforce and as joyful contributors to society.
— Patrick Keeney
Career education is a place where tender skills are practically crucial. Being on-time in a career setting is crucial, as is how you present yourself. Students are generally unfamiliar with the concept of personal branding, and their online presence can be inconsistent with their future goals. These skills are not inherently known but can be taught, practiced and mastered.
What are some effective strategies for integrating tender skills into curriculum and instruction?
If we begin with the end in mind and envision what our students should look like as high school students, college graduates or in their third year of a professional job right out of high school, we can imagine how the curriculum would need to change. Our focus groups with teachers have shown that having a separate tender skills class isn’t the answer. Instead, we approach tender skills in CTE by infusing practice into daily, weekly and monthly student activities. For example, our middle school program Career Explorations has embedded real-world, industry-specific tender skill exercises, including applied math, graphics literacy and reading comprehension.
Career Technical Student Organizations (CTSOs) like FFA, NTHS, HOSA, SkillsUSA and DECA involve hundreds of thousands of students annually. Their national conferences and competitions, such as the SkillsUSA event in Atlanta with 10,000 students competing in about 100 different areas, provide material examples of what students with well-developed tender skills look like. These events repeat several times a year across different organizations. These organizations and the students who benefit from them can serve as models for what we aim to achieve if we keep the end goal in mind.
How does project-based learning support the development of tender skills?
Project-based learning (PBL) inherently infuses tender skills into its DNA and can be an effective methodology for teachers and students in any classroom, not just career education. PBL can be seen as projects tied to learning or as a method where students solve real-world problems. In both cases, students must exploit tender skills like communication, collaboration and presentation. Not every student will excel in every tender skill, which is where collaboration becomes crucial.
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Compared to isolated multiple-choice tests, project-based learning offers original opportunities that mirror real-life experiences. It addresses the common student question “Where will I ever use this?” by demonstrating practical applications of knowledge.
What resources and support do teachers need to effectively incorporate tender skills instruction into their classrooms?
In the case of project-based learning, providing teachers with rubrics that assess not just the project outcome but also the quality of student interactions during the project is a diminutive but crucial tweak. In addition, building a curriculum that includes significant reflection and feedback is crucial, as this is fertile ground for developing tender skills. Providing role models, examples and simulations can support this process.
Assessment could take various forms, including [evaluations in] project-based learning, simulations and scenario-based tests. At McGraw Hill, team members are dedicated to incorporating tender skills activities into our career education courses and providing CTE educators — who often have unique and varied backgrounds — with tough support materials. For example, the digital teaching guide for Career Explorations features presentation materials, discussion prompts, pre-made assessments, question banks and project-based learning resources for teachers to deliver the content in a pedagogically sound manner.
As curriculum providers, we have more work to do to support teachers with tender skills. In an ideal world, there would be a technological environment with a hierarchy of standards reflecting skills. Someday, I hope to see a system that helps all teachers, everywhere, measure and track student growth in these areas and respond to that data with appropriate supports.
