By Kevin Stoda, Salalah College of Technology, Oman
Here was one of the headlines of this year: "World's youth fear jobless future: The Middle East is worst hit with 25.5 percent unemployment among young men and 39.4 percent for young women." With recognition of these needs for employment in the Arab world, I seek to assist peoples in the Middle East to become more employable in the coming years. I have worked in the region since 1999.
Because
there have sometimes been discrepancies between the training offered at the tertiary
levels and the present (& future) needs of the labour market, many
students, teachers and educational institutions are interested in both teaching
soft-skills and applying various business & industrial (professional)
practices in the classroom (Watts, 1998; Hissey , 2000 ; Noll
& Wilkin, 2002; ODEP, 2010) . Interestingly, (1) by introducing a variety of professional practices,
including soft skills, and (2) by providing opportunities to reflect on those behaviours
used in simulations and group activities,
students often quickly understand what behaviours are expected and needed to
succeed both academically and in the world of work. One important way to ensure this progress is
through the development of appropriate group-work evaluation rubrics--i.e. rubrics
which support the goal of helping students integrate themselves as individuals in
a successful group, office, or team.
These evaluation practices support students and society well in terms of
both improving individual achievement in the academic- and professional worlds.
INTRODUCTION
Much
has been written about the needs of Omani students to individually
self-evaluate their own individual performances in the classroom. The hope has been that an important classroom-
and lifelong-learning skills will be achieved. (Klenowski, 1995; Sullivan et. al. 1998; Rolheiser &
Ross, 2012 ). For example, in our
college's foundation program, both level 1 and level 2 students evaluate their
work each week in what we call a "study skills class". However, until now,
these same students on our campus have not been evaluated regularly in terms of
their achievements in group work activities [1] --nor have these students
been asked to reflecting much about
their performances in groups in informal ways.
With this paper, I encourage all schools in
This
paper posits that group work activities, i.e. which are regularly followed by
supportive evaluation rubrics and student-teacher reflection, can help students and teachers focus on important soft skills, such as a
variety of (a) communicative skills, (b) problem-solving skills, (c) team-work
skills, (d) information management, (e) professionalism, and (f) various leadership
practices. It is clear that such rubrics
can and do support progress (continuous) assessments. That is, their employment in classrooms and
for projects outside of the class will improve time-on-tasks efforts for both
groups and individuals. Moreover, these
practices will enable students to improve their efforts and overall-success in (and
out of) the classroom in a variety of repeated activities over time.
In the following sections of this paper, (1) I
will share my own background in undertaking group activities and evaluations as
an educator or language trainer, and (2) I will present and discuss a variety
of evaluation options for groups, which
highlight or reinforce particular groups of soft-skills needed for more-and-more
successful group (and individual) efforts in the classroom and in the
workplace.
Why Self-Evaluate?
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