Let’s start with a misperception.
It goes something like this: Progressive educators promote “soft skills” at the expense of “hard skills.” They are so concerned with teaching teamwork, self-confidence, and creativity that they neglect core academic virtues. Within this camp, weepy-eyed softies hold hands with 21st-century technocrats to jettison what students should really be doing: mastering disciplinary content, reading canonical texts, and applying fundamental academic skills.
Here’s another one: Traditional educators promote “hard skills” at the expense of “soft skills.” They are so concerned with having students memorize facts out of stale textbooks that they take the joy and humanity out of learning. Within this camp, hard-nosed schoolmarms embrace dusty old professors to jettison what students should really be doing: developing interpersonal skills, following their passions, and solving real-world problems.
To be fair, both of these misperceptions often glean truth in their peripheral visions. Indeed, you might know an educator who fits one of the above descriptions to a T, or you might be one yourself. While there are stark and often incompatible differences between progressive pedagogues and their more traditional colleagues, these differences are not absolute. There can be—and there often is—convergence between them.
In my 19 years of teaching a project-based curriculum in a progressive school, some of the best projects that I’ve been a part of or observed demonstrate this convergence. They succeed not because anyone follows a rubric of hard skills or checks off a list of the softer ones (although both are useful); they work because teachers plan meaningfully and rigorously in ways that allow the synergy of soft and hard skills to interact.
Soft and hard skills are not distinct entities. Categorizing them as such limits the possibilities of our pedagogy and promotes misunderstanding. We should reframe soft interpersonal skills and hard academic ones not as monads (i.e., distinct elements made up of their own laws) but as a dialectical unity (i.e., interdependent elements that coexist synergistically within the same object). They are two sides of the same coin, not separate coins.
Developing the soft skill of perseverance, for example, is inherent to developing the hard skills of fact acquisition and synthesis. When students go through numerous revisions of an argument because they don’t understand an author’s counterclaim, or when students have to start a carpentry project from scratch because they got the math wrong, they learn something about facts and something about perseverance. Students don’t need a separate perseverance lesson. They learn perseverance by doing perseverance. In other words, when a class maintains high expectations regarding content knowledge, students actively learn and apply the soft skills of perseverance.
The synergy of hard and soft skills doesn’t just happen. Synergy is not a singular force unleashed into the classroom. It requires work. Teacher planning, direct instruction, indirect facilitation, student revision, and a maniacal eye on the calendar are all necessary components of creating synergistic opportunities to teach both hard content and soft skills. Fundamentally, academic synergy requires a relevant process and meaningful product.
Of the many ways we might promote synergy, I offer teaching and learning academic content as our starting point. Traditionalists are right but in nontraditional ways: content should guide curriculum, but not in terms of the memorization of facts or the breadth of coverage. It should provide opportunities for the exploration of rich questions that teach students to think in a new way. Viewed through this lens, content provides a playing field, or arena, within which students explore compelling problems. It is a precondition that allows for the synergy of hard and soft skills.
I will take it one step further. The primacy of content requires disciplinary thinking as the foundation—the kind of thinking that challenges teachers and students to think from a particular disciplinary perspective. It’s more than learning the facts of history, science, or math. It’s learning to think like historians, scientists, and mathematicians. Academic disciplines provide entry points into the world. They carry their own assumptions and methodologies about what is true, beautiful, and good. By doing so, they provide conceptual tools that assist us in understanding what William James called the “blooming, buzzing, confusion” of our world.
Arguing for the primacy of disciplinary content does not undermine the multidisciplinary teaching often promoted by project-based learning or other progressive pedagogies, but rather strengthens it. Without disciplinary frameworks, multidisciplinary teaching loses its power. Students and teachers risk gliding on the surface of a problem without diving in. We are left with a prefix divorced from its root. Multidisciplinary projects are some of the richest projects because students are compelled to explore a problem through multiple lenses and discern the interconnectedness of reality. The rich, deep project-based learning that I value is made possible because of disciplines, not in spite of them.
Partnerships where I, a humanities teacher, collaborated with biology teachers illustrate this point. One year I partnered with a teacher in a multidisciplinary collaboration that covered genetic engineering, and the following year I partnered with another teacher to cover the topic of health. In these projects, students explored questions like, “Should we pursue genetic technologies?” and “Is health care a right or a privilege?” While my teaching partner explored genetic technologies and the delivery of health care from a scientific point of view, I explored these topics the way philosophers do. Students developed arguments based on a variety of ethical theories, used deductive reasoning, and applied abstract concepts to concrete case studies. The two classes—what we called a “team”—often came together to practice in a series of student-led panel discussions that culminated in a final panel for our public exhibition. This type of approach is firmly rooted in disciplinary thinking and is multidisciplinary.
Multidisciplinary projects require a broad guiding question with entry points for multiple disciplinary perspectives and a series of subquestions that are discipline-specific. They are facilitated by school structures that promote collaboration and planning between teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds. Common prep periods, block schedules, and dedicated planning time are common structures that make collaboration possible. While the most robust projects are often collaborative, multidisciplinary work does not preclude teachers from incorporating different disciplines on their own. A teacher might, for example, include a study of literature in a history project, or, depending on the breadth of their academic background, teach both the biology and sociology of junk science that has led to wrongful convictions in our criminal justice system.
Of course, not all projects—or curricula—need be multidisciplinary, and neither can they be, for a variety of reasons that grow out of local circumstances. Regardless, academic content is the starting point—but not the end. A content-rich disciplinary project provides a starting point for personal and interpersonal growth to flourish and continues to fuel that flourishing throughout the project.
A conversation about content inevitably raises the issue of depth and breadth and what content to teach in the first place. These are often the most fundamental sticking points between progressives and traditionalists, even when they agree that content is important but disagree on what that content should be. Typically, the more traditional way of designing curriculum provides an overview of a given subject and investigates that subject through a disciplinary lens. This approach provides context and establishes a broad range of foundational content and discipline specific concepts that allow students to see the “big picture” and draw connections within. A history survey, for example, might provide greater opportunities to study change and continuity over time (a historical way of thinking) than a deep dive into a particular event. Conversely, the more progressive way relishes the deep dive. It provides a more narrow, and thus more detailed, exploration of a topic. It offers students the opportunity to become “experts” in a specific topic and avoids the pitfalls of rushing through curriculum at the expense of deep thinking, exploration, and creativity. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. In the former, students might see the forest but miss the trees. In the latter, they might see the trees but miss the forest.
Even with these significant differences, however, convergence is possible in ways that do not undermine disciplinary exploration and the synergy of skills. At the most superficial level, both approaches highlight the importance of facts. Progressives might worry about having too many of them, and traditionalists worry about having too few. Both agree they are important but disagree on which ones to teach and how (or if) students should interpret them. At a more foundational level, however, one might imagine a curriculum that does a little of both. You can have your breadth and dive into it as well.
Take, for example, a history class (or “project”) in which students are asked, “Do people make history, or does history make people?” The teacher might guide students into exploring this question through the lens of race in U.S. history from the colonial period to the civil rights movement. Students could deep-dive into a small number of chronological case studies that illuminate specific examples of successful and thwarted human agency.
This approach is sure to displease those who worry about providing a broad history survey. It leaves out other important topics and by doing so diminishes the number of connections students can make between past and present. It might even displease those who worry that each period in our history deserves a deeper dive as multiple case studies dilute the richness of one. But it does demonstrate how content knowledge can be incorporated into a progressive curriculum that avoids cramming broad swaths of facts into a short amount of time.
In this formulation, students explore thematically related case studies pertaining to topical events and interpret them through a disciplinary perspective. By doing so, they discover historical tendencies and patterns that can be applied to their own time and place.
I don’t suggest that we find a formula that creates the perfect balance between depth and breadth. I propose that we plan our curriculum by asking, “Do I need to broaden my content or narrow it for students to investigate this question?” or “What case studies (and how many) best allow us to explore this problem?” With these types of questions serving as the foundation, we have taken the first steps to promote the synergy of hard and soft skills.
A tenth-grade history project that I co-taught a number of years ago with a student teacher will serve as an example. We called this project Bonapartism, after a concept used by Karl Marx. It refers to the historical tendency of revolutions to undermine themselves by resorting to dictatorship. Students explored some of the biggest questions historians can ask: “What is the relationship between the present and past?” and “Is there a pattern to history, or is each period unique?” Two specific case studies guided their exploration of these questions: the French Revolution of 1789 and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.
By choosing the guiding questions and the case studies, I created a framework for inquiry. This was intentional and served several purposes. First, the framework provided a degree of depth and breadth. The comparison of two revolutions over 200 years apart created the breadth necessary to explore the big historical questions mentioned above. It also allowed for depth. Limiting the project to two case studies afforded students the opportunity to study the rich nuances of each. Second, the Egyptian Revolution was contemporary and ongoing. It was in the news and the subject of an award-winning documentary, thus providing the content, and the discipline of history, with contemporary relevance. An approach to PBL that takes disciplinary knowledge as the starting point necessitates that teachers create a framework that facilitates student engagement with disciplinary ways of thinking.
Within this framework, students analyzed primary sources, conducted seminars, engaged in comparative analysis, and wrote argumentative essays. They learned facts because of their significance to the inquiry and encountered historical actors with different versions of those facts. They applied what they learned to a contemporary problem that was in the news every day and developed their own interpretations. Through these ways and others, the project was deeply rooted in content and developed the hard skills necessary for its exploration. Far from dumbing down curriculum, the disciplinary exploration of content deepens it. It’s what historians, mathematicians, and scientists do—and it’s what students can do with thoughtful teaching.
Content, however, is a necessary but insufficient condition for promoting the synergy of hard and soft skills. The other component is a final product that is ideally presented to a broader community. A good product not only provides a vehicle for learning content and disciplinary thinking; it also promotes collaboration, problem-solving, self-knowledge, and other soft skills. What matters most is not the kind of product that’s exhibited or the medium used—whether it’s an artifact or a performance, tech-based or old-school. What matters is that it provides meaning and purpose for student work, reflects student thinking, and is relevant to the world outside the classroom. The public exhibition of a product, within the context of meaningful inquiry, is the north star that answers the question, “Why do we have to learn this?”
For Bonapartism, our product was composed of monologues, written by students from the perspective of historical actors, that we filmed to create a documentary. We exhibited our films at a community center and interspersed excerpts from the documentary with live narration and student-led readings from the primary sources they had studied.
What’s fundamental is that Bonapartism’s product and its exhibition both provided an authentic goal for students to work toward. The creation of products and their exhibition would not have been possible without soft skills being employed on many levels—from studying history as members of a group to the collaboration needed to film the monologues.
Expectations were high, and the public nature of the exhibition made them higher. Students learned to persevere and problem-solve through practical obstacles like outside noise, lighting issues, old equipment, and their teacher’s lack of technical expertise. From Day 1, students learned content with the final product in mind and created products that reinforced historical thinking and demonstrated the refinement in thinking required for a public exhibition. Filming creative monologues as a group reinforced what students learned from primary and secondary sources. Writing comparative arguments reinforced what they learned from the monologues. A feedback loop of mutually reinforcing skills developed—what I call synergy.
The key point is to not fetishize the product at the expense of process. Both are essential. Without process, we lose disciplinary thinking and interpersonal skills. Without a product, disciplinary thinking and interpersonal skills become less meaningful because they are decontextualized—for some students, to the point of irrelevance. Indeed, process and product are so intertwined that we should sweep them into the dustbin of binary oppositions, along with their hard- and soft-skill brethren. We can use these terms when needed, as various parts of the project might need to focus on one or the other, but keep them in their place when they get in the way.
I’m suggesting nothing less than a shift in mind-set. Instead of situating ourselves along a linear spectrum—with progressive pedagogues sitting on the left and traditionalists on the right—we should think in a more dialectical way, one that harnesses the skills and strategies of different approaches to create a synergistic pedagogy that takes full advantage of the ways in which they best work together.
Thinking synergistically opens possibilities and keeps us honest. By considering how different pedagogies work together, curriculum design and implementation are enriched, if not made easier. It prevents us from hunkering into entrenched positions and promotes the exchange of ideas across pedagogical approaches and political orientations. If we lose sight of these possibilities, we run the risk of falling victim to pedagogical posturing and stale bromides. When teachers develop thoughtful, content-rich curriculum and scaffold skills, and when students are tasked with meaningful and rigorous work that explores deep questions and builds toward a common goal, the distinction between “tradition” and “progress,” “hard” and “soft,” “process” and “product” begins to blur. What we are left with is quality work.
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