In a new report, Skills for Success: Supporting and Assessing Key Habits, Mindsets, and Skills in PreK-12, Melissa Tooley and Laura Bornfreund highlight trends and raise important considerations for schools supporting and assessing a more comprehensive set of student “skills for success” and explore how assessments of these skills could be used to inform school improvement and accountability strategies.
Skills for Success include grit, self-discipline, and critical thinking, which are often directly encouraged in early education, but then abandoned in later years of school. While schools and teachers certainly recognize the importance of these skills, they may not be equipped to integrate them into daily instruction in a meaningful fashion. Tooley and Bornfreund believe this is crucial because research shows that children learn and refine these skills into adolescence.
One of the key ways that Tooley and Bornfreund recommend that changes can be effected is to increase accountability for skills for success:
Some of our recommendations focus on increasing the visibility of school policies and practices that can influence students’ skills for success and holding schools and educators accountable for improving areas that are lacking. To date, the evidence from K–12 SFS implementation indicates that if SFS and the practices that promote them are not monitored by outside stakeholders in some way, educators push them to the side to focus on those areas that accountability systems are based on.
You can find the full report here: edcentr.al/skillsforsuccess
