417. Life Skills in the Liberal Arts

Show Notes

• Bauer, A. C. (2025). Teaching Life Skills in the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Preparing Students for Success Beyond the Classroom. Taylor & Francis.
• NACE Competencies
• Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson (2025). The Disengaged Teen. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 374. January 1.
• Anderson, Jenny and Rebecca Winthrop (2025). The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. Penguin Random House.
• TILT Higher Ed
• Angela Bauer (2018). Closing the performance gap. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 49. October 3.
• Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence? Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Implications for educators. New York: Basic Book. PP, 3-31.
• Access to Innovators series – High Point University
• Ethical Reasoning in Action. James Madison University

Transcript

John: Students engage when they see a connection between what they are learning and their future objectives. In this episode, we discuss integrating life skills into a liberal arts curriculum.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Angela Bauer. Angela is a biologist and the Provost and Executive Vice President at Texas Women’s University. Prior to this, she served in several leadership positions at High Point University. Angela is also the author of Teaching Life Skills in the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Preparing Students for Success Beyond the Classroom which has recently been released by Taylor and Francis. Welcome back, Angela.

Angela: Thank you so much, Rebecca, and good to see you and John. It’s been a while, but I’m so happy to be here.

John: We’re very glad to talk to you again. We were very glad to see you have this new book that just came out. Today’s teas are:… Angela, are you drinking tea?

Angela: I am. I have a ginger turmeric tea, which I am enjoying, and in full transparency, I do also need something a little bit more high octane in the morning, so I have a cup of very strong coffee right next to my tea. But I wanted to be a team player, so I’ve got the tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: Very good.

Rebecca: I appreciate the team play, for sure. I have Scottish breakfast this morning, John.

John: And I have black raspberry green tea today.

Angela: Oh, that sounds delicious.

John: It really is, for me, at least ,Rebecca may have a different view.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the berry teas, but we have a nice eclectic mix today, so that’s good, something for everyone. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Teaching Life Skills in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the book?

Angela: I’d be really happy to. This book has been in the making for quite some time. I would say even its origins began when I was a student. I am a product of a liberal arts education, and the impact of that was really transformative on my life in terms of how it influenced me to view the world through different lenses, depending on the situation, and to just be a lifelong learner, to be curious about things in a way that that education really instilled in me, that mindset, that it instilled in me. As I went through the ranks as a faculty member, of course, I held very much to those traditions. As a biologist, I contributed courses to the traditional [LAUGHTER] science requirement within the liberal arts core. But over time, as I rose through leadership positions in higher ed, I became more aware of sometimes the disconnect between the value of what we’re providing within the classroom in a liberal arts education and how that prepares students for their professional paths. So I want to start by saying that there are so many things that happen within the context of a liberal arts education that prepare you so well for any professional setting, in terms of your ability to look at problems from multiple perspectives, to write in a way that is clear and cogent and all the good things, and to communicate your ideas in a way that is effective and that and tailored for your audience. I mean, there are so many ways in which my liberal arts education prepared me for the world in a variety of ways, regardless of what my chosen profession would be, and I saw that happening in my students. But I also, over time, saw a disconnect sometimes between what students viewed happening within their liberal arts courseworks… they really weren’t quite getting what we were accomplishing in terms of how that related to what they would need to do in their future professions. So there was that. That doesn’t mean that we weren’t doing great things to prepare them for their professions, but they were kind of missing the connection. And by the way, we found that out in great detail when I served as Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at High Point University where we did surveys of former students, current students, when we were investigating potential revisions of our liberal arts core. We got a lot of data indicating that students thought, “Yeah, it’s great to take this sort of smorgasbord of courses, but I’m not quite getting the connection among them and how it relates to my career,” so we needed to do a better job there. Also, increasingly, over time, we were hearing from some of the business leaders, nonprofit leaders within the community, who would come to our campus to meet with us and talk with students and connect them to the community in different ways to provide internships, et cetera. We were hearing also the value of instilling in them skills that maybe weren’t necessarily intentionally addressed in their liberal arts core. And so that’s what ultimately led to all of this. There’s much more to that story, but when I did work at High Point University, even before we considered revisions of the liberal arts core, our marketing and communications team had noticed how employers, community members, prospective students, parents of prospective students, really responded to this idea of students learning life skills within their coursework. So life skills was the term that we used at High Point University for skills that prepare students for their profession and for life, regardless of what that profession is. So they’re skills that sort of transcend disciplinary boundaries and have importance in so many areas of life. That’s a very informal definition, but some refer to those types of skills in different ways. So, some would call them workforce readiness skills. Some who are very invested in the NACE competencies, they see a lot of parallels with the NACE competencies. Some call them human skills. So there are some of these skills that employers are seeking from our students that fall within the realm of, I would argue, the affective domain of learning. They’re sort of the people skills, the soft skills in terms of, how do you be a good team player? How can we prepare students to be more coachable, so that when they get into the work environment, they’re able to respond to feedback and change course or course correct, so that they’re more impactful in the work that they do? So we were having success in terms of the resonance of that messaging before it was incorporated into the core, and it kind of became what High Point University is known for. It is what High Point University is known for. They are the Life Skills University. So when it came time, as institutions do, we go back and revisit our core. Is it where we needed to be? Is it having the outcomes that we are really seeking? Is it meeting the needs of today’s students when they enter their professions? We saw the opportunity to connect to the life skills messaging, also to the liberal arts core, and so all of that work is what really got me even more invested [LAUGHTER] in the enduring value of a liberal arts education, and also some ways in which we could consider fresh approaches to it, in order to best prepare our students for lives as competent professionals and engaged citizens and all the things that we wish for them. And so kind of a long-winded answer to say, I spent a really long time thinking about what might be included in this book. Now I didn’t actually get to the purpose of the book in this conversation, and it is the following, when we had been working really hard to infuse our liberal arts core with these competencies, skills, life skills, human skills, whatever, that employers are seeking, what we found was that a lot of them fell within to a realm of teaching or pedagogy that a lot of us are not trained for within higher ed. So I’ll tick off some of the top life skills that we see cited in employer surveys. And by the way, I should mention I am now Provost at Texas Women’s University, so I’m at a different institution, and I’m meeting a lot with employers in the region to hear from them what it is that we need to be focusing on in terms of workforce readiness, to best prepare our students to enter their professions. And a lot of those skills fall within, again, the affective domain of learning, like emotional intelligence and I mentioned coachability earlier. Teamwork falls into that realm as well. You know, being a good team player, there’s a lot there that you have to be good at to be an effective team player. You have to communicate well, there are facets of emotional intelligence, obviously, that are wrapped up into being a good team player. You have to be coachable. You have to be open to respond to feedback from your teammates or maybe from your supervisor in a way that helps move the team forward to reach its collective goal. Do we do some of that in traditional liberal arts courses? Yes, we do, but do we really know how to significantly move the needle on some of those affective skills? I would argue no. And actually, a lot of the literature out there indicates that we could be doing a lot better by intentionally teaching these skills. So this book arose from what I saw is a void in our knowledge about how to best teach these skills that employers are seeking. And by the way, it doesn’t only pertain to these lesser studied skills that fall within the affective domain of learning, it also applies to skills that we in higher ed, for centuries probably, have touted as being the outcome of a liberal arts education, that being critical thinking. So when I actually dove into the literature to determine what to include in my chapter on best practices for teaching and measuring students’ development of critical thinking, I was actually kind of stunned. I mean, I knew a little bit of this before, but when I really dug in, I was kind of stunned on how we approach critical thinking in higher ed. Not everyone, I don’t mean to generalize, but often [LAUGHTER] we just think that our students pick up critical thinking as they’re writing or speaking or engaging in debate in the classroom or Socratic dialog, but actually, what we now know based on the teaching and learning literature is that the way to really move the needle on critical thinking is to be intentional in talking about it with students. Not only do you provide them with opportunities to engage in critical thinking… that does have an impact… but you can totally maximize the impact that you have if you preface all of that with a unit on talking about what is critical thinking? What does it look like? How do we take one aspect of critical thinking and apply it within different contexts? When you include a unit like that within your course and then dive into all the wonderful things in a liberal arts course that we do, challenging readings, writing papers, communicating, debating, etc, you have a much greater impact on students’ development of critical thinking than if you just assumed they were picking it up by default based on their engagement in all of those activities. Anyway, the book dives into all of that. It dives into the skills that we as academics aren’t typically trained to teach that fall within the affective domain of learning, like coachability, teamwork, etc, but it also addresses some that fall within the cognitive domain that we could probably maximize our impact if we were just a little bit more intentional about how we teach them. Critical thinking would be one of them.

John: We’ve been hearing a lot about many of the things that you found at High Point. In a past podcast interview with Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, we talked about their book, The Disengaged Teen, and one of the things they talked about was how students in general have felt more disconnected from what they’re learning, that they don’t see the relevance of it to their lives. And that sounds very similar to the findings that you found at High Point. So this is a pretty significant shift, though, I imagine, for many faculty, how did faculty react to this shift? Was there a uniform consensus that developed very quickly, or was there a bit of resistance from people who preferred an emphasis just on the traditional liberal arts approach?

Angela: Oh, John, there was a lot of healthy debate, [LAUGHTER] but it was really, really healthy. It was so interesting to hear where everyone fell with respect to their beliefs in what a liberal arts education is all about. But meanwhile, there was this desire… we had, this branding going on of our institution at High Point University, we’re touting ourselves as a life skills university and addressing some of those skills in coursework outside of the actual core. That was really resonating with prospective students and parents and existing students, and actually on top of that, we were hearing from the employers that hired our students about how impactful those experiences were. So while there were those who are more wedded to the idea that the tradition of the liberal arts is just to instill, not just, but it is to instill lifelong learning, curiosity, the ability to view the world from different perspectives, there were definitely those who were actually very reluctant to tie it to anything related to professional outcomes. It’s not uncommon to High Point’s campus. That’s widespread. So there was that. But then there were also those who thought, “Well, why can’t we do both?” Like, “why can’t we accomplish the goals that we have for a traditional liberal arts education, while at the same time maybe structuring our classroom activities that also allow us to address some of these skills and competencies that we know are going to really help them be successful and that haven’t maybe traditionally been addressed in a liberal arts education? How can we also incorporate that? So couldn’t we do both?” And in the end, we had a lot of working groups, faculty forums, surveys, many opportunities for feedback. In the end, we actually had a faculty vote on adopting these life skills based learning outcomes. And by the way, I should mention that we had these life skills outcomes related to many that I’ve already addressed, but we maintained the traditional structure of their coursework, so they still took a course in natural sciences and quantitative reasoning and all that. But it was within those traditional liberal arts courses that we mapped these life skills based learning outcomes. So all that was said and done. But in the end, the vote was not like an on-the-fence vote. The overall faculty vote was very much in favor of adopting the life skills outcomes. So in the end, I think, generally speaking, people were really happy with it.

Rebecca: So you’ve talked a little bit about the process that was used to gain some consensus across the faculty. Can you provide some examples of what this kind of integrated learning outcome looks like that combines this traditional liberal arts approach with these life skills.

Angela: Yes, I’d be very happy to. So, when we sat down to map the life skills based learning outcomes to specific courses within the curriculum, some made a lot of sense in terms of where the best fit might be, just based on the nature of the work that happens within that discipline. So let’s use teamwork as an example. Right off the top of our heads, we thought about the courses in which students often work in teams, where there might be conflict or stress, and of course, what immediately popped to mind was natural sciences. We had a lab-based natural sciences course requirement within our liberal arts core, which I loved… what a great experience for students… but oftentimes in those courses, and especially in the way in which those courses were designed, where some of them were very much inquiry based, which is challenging for students. What a great place to teach teamwork, right? …when students are working in groups of two, three, four, to come up with a novel hypothesis to test, design an experiment, analyze data, do all the things, divvy up the responsibilities of carrying out the experiment. So what if, within that context, we are really intentional about how we structure teamwork? And talk with students about the challenges that teams experience and what makes for a functional versus a dysfunctional team, talk with them about the importance of feedback from their team members, and then taking that feedback, first of all, determining what feedback is meaningful, also, because not all feedback is meaningful, so an important part of it is figuring out, okay, what’s the most potentially impactful feedback that I’ve gotten, and then how do I course correct to make that happen? That was a natural fit to teach teamwork within the natural sciences. There are other ways… we had an ethical reasoning life skills outcome that’s, of course, very easily mapped to a philosophy or a religion course. And so that ethical reasoning outcome was mapped to those courses. I’m trying to think of some others, communication is obvious. Those [LAUGHTER] were all handled in comp courses and also a first-year seminar. So those are a few examples of how we took those life skills outcomes and embedded them in traditional courses in a way that wouldn’t take away content from those courses or the intention of those courses as a critical part of a liberal arts experience. It was just more intentionally structuring some of the activities that happened within that course in a way that made it explicit to students: Here’s one of the skills you’re gaining from this, and here’s why it’s going to be important in the workplace. Now, here’s how we can really nail this, and then laying out all the aspects of teamwork that would be important for them to know and to engage in in that course.

John: And would seem that the TILT approach that Mary-Ann Winkelmes has suggested might make this even more effective by making it explicit to students, because even though many classes were already doing those things, that information wasn’t always obvious to the students in the classes, and just making that connection explicit, I think, would be helpful.

Angela: Absolutely, and I’m going to go back to my critical thinking model, because that literature was so telling, and I ended up referencing one of the meta analyzes about critical thinking that demonstrated that in subsequent chapters, like, let’s be intentional about doing this stuff and not assume anymore that, “Well, I assigned a group project so they’re learning how to be a member of a team.” We all know that ain’t always how it works. In critical thinking, in terms of the meta analyses that have been done about different scholarship of teaching and learning studies on critical thinking, there are two different viewpoints of how to teach critical thinking: there’s the generalist view, and then the specifist view, the general views fits more within the realm of cognitive psych. The cognitive psychologists, their goal is just to talk about what it is, be very specific about what it is, give examples, practice learning it, and then transferring it into different contexts. Whereas the specifist views, which often fall within the realm of the philosophers, for example, they believe it is dependent on a deep dive into the content and context of the course in order to become a critical thinker, it’s not necessarily about intentionally teaching it. Well, we know from meta analyses of studies on critical thinking how to teach it, and how students learn in response to those different methods, we need a mix of both the generalist and the specifists views in order to move the needle the most with respect to critical thinking.

Rebecca: You talked a little bit about some of the marketing strategies upfront that maybe led to some of these conversations, or at least contributed to some of these conversations. Can you talk a bit more about how this integrated approach affected student recruitment at High Point?

Angela: When I served as Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at High Point University, I, along with our Provost at the time, we were very engaged with recruiting events, open houses. We would do a presentation to all prospective students who might be visiting on a weekend for open house. We would do a presentation about our university mission and what life skills was all about, etc. And also talk about a liberal arts education and what that meant. By far, the predominance of questions that we would get from prospective students and their parents was, “How is this liberal arts degree going to prepare me for life beyond the classroom? …and the life skills theme really resonated with them. This is just based on my experience. And I have to say, when a lot of the institution really did experience continued success and continues to grow. And I would argue, liberal arts institutions aren’t really doing that right now. Some of them are not. Some of them are struggling with enrollment, but High Point continued to experience enrollment growth, and also continued to, during that time period, experience enhanced retention of first-year students, in particular. Like all other institutions, we were really focused on that first- to second-year transition because it’s so critical. Now, did life skills play a role in retention? So many other retention efforts happen on a campus. It’s hard to attribute it to just that, but what I can tell you is that it really helped provide shared purpose to what we were doing on our campus, kind of like a QEP. You know how accrediting bodies require campuses to engage in a quality enhancement project of some sort that everyone can get behind related to student learning? I would say it almost felt like that. We had had a prior successful QEP on our campus that focused on instilling in students a growth mindset approach to their college work, and really saw people from many different areas of university life really buying into that QEP. That’s how it worked out with the life skills initiative as well, incorporating it into the liberal arts core. It really helped create this shared purpose on our campus in terms of how everyone was contributing to those learning outcomes.

John: We should also reference our past podcast with you, which was a while ago, about how you had integrated growth mindset messaging into biology classes with some really strong results.

Angela: Yes, so when growth mindset was the QEP, Quality Enhancement proposal, at High Point University, we really worked hard to develop innovative teaching practices where students were exposed to growth mindset ideas, often in challenging courses. It was most helpful, and we actually did a whole study within our STEM courses. So there were a couple of different studies, publications that came out of that. But what we found was that when we just took time during the week, maybe 10 minutes at the start of the week and provided students with a particular growth mindset idea or strategy that they might employ and then emphasize that theme, maybe during other days of the week or at times when students experienced a really challenging exam or maybe a laboratory exercise, it improved academic outcomes. In the end, it was amazing. And yeah, so that was a wonderful QEP, and I would argue it had a really significant impact on student outcomes. You know how you have students… well, I’ll speak for myself. I’m getting old. [LAUGHTER] I’ve taught a lot of students in my day, and I love when I have students who I keep in touch with, typically through social media, but sometimes they text me or send me emails. There is one story in particular of a student. I love this story. It’s actually hard for me to talk about it without it getting emotional, because I love this student, and it is the most amazing story. She came to High Point University and really loved science, but she took her first-year introductory biology course, and man, that’s a tough one. It always is a tough one for students, and she didn’t do well, and she needed to retake it. First of all, she was just a gritty student to begin with. Some students fail, and they’ll walk away and say, “Oh, I guess I’m not a science person, and move on.” Well, she had heard some of the growth mindset messaging that I had been giving in different settings just to introduce students to the idea of what it means to have a growth mindset and how it might help them take on challenging coursework. So she’d come to my office and talk about it, and she retook the class, and actually did quite well in the class. She ended up completing a biology major. All right. Now, did she graduate with a 4.0? No, she did not. STEM courses were a challenge for her, but she had a growth mindset, and she took it on, and she continued to improve. She really wanted to get a PhD. She said that experience for her was so transformative. She loved science. She wanted to spread her passion for science. Applied to PhD programs. Didn’t get in… the GPA thing. So we talked about the importance, maybe of getting your foot in the door. Maybe get a lab tech position at an R1 institution, get to know the faculty, demonstrate your ability to engage in the scientific method. She did all that. She did, a lab tech position at one institution, went to another. Well, guess what? Oh, I love this outcome. She got into their PhD program, and I think she’s passed her qualifying exams. Occasionally, I’ll get a text with an update. “You’re not going to believe this. Look what I did,” and she’ll share where she is. But all of that started with a student who could have just walked away, and maybe would have just walked away had she not been studying growth mindset strategies and how that might impact her ability to reach this professional goal that she had set with herself. So I just think it’s so powerful, and I want to also share that growth mindset strategies are really, I would argue, a facet of a broader topic, which is emotional intelligence. So if you break down emotional intelligence into the four facets, as described by Mayer and Salovey, which I cite in my book, I structure all of the emotional intelligence teaching activities around those four facets of emotional intelligence that they have defined, that are broadly accepted within the academic community. They include emotional awareness, emotional understanding, understanding why someone might be exhibiting this particular emotion in a certain context, emotional management, that one’s obvious. But then another facet of emotional intelligence is emotional facilitation. When you have a day, we all have those days, right? [LAUGHTER]…where you’re like, “oh, I don’t want to do this,” or “this is going to be really hard,” how do you muster up the mindset and the emotions that are going to help you be successful in that day? Well, growth mindset is that right? Like, if you encounter a challenging math assignment, rather than sitting back and saying, “I’m just so not good at this, I hate this. Blah, blah, blah,” if you say, “Okay, this is going to help me grow, it’s going to be hard work. But I have to get through it,” it just totally changes one’s perspective. So anyway, we are now, at Texas Women’s University, we’re doing a study right now that broadens this approach, not just including growth mindset strategies, but also addressing these other four facets of emotional intelligence, as defined by Mayer and Salovey. And so we’re taking the same approach, little 10 minute lessons for students, and we’re doing them in STEM courses. Isn’t that great? Because STEM courses ,often, big emotions arise in STEM courses, right? They’re challenging, and there are many expectations beyond just like the didactic coursework, there’s all the lab stuff, and it is hard. So what a great ground like, what a great opportunity for us to test out some of these lessons where students are maybe struggling with some emotions in the context of the semester. So I don’t have any data to share with you [LAUGHTER] on that about its impact, because we’re still in the pilot phase of that study. But, anyway, growth mindset strategies, that was a wonderful project at High Point University, huge impact on student outcomes and just the whole mindset of the campus. And I know they have broadened their QEP now to include emotional intelligence, so that is their focus. And yeah, so stay tuned for more good data about that.

John: It sounds like that’s a very useful life skill to be including as part of that emotional intelligence component.

Angela: Absolutely

Rebecca: Sounds like a future conversation is brewing. [LAUGHTER]

Angela: I would love to, because that would mean there was a great finding to share. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So, in your examples about emotional intelligence, as well as these bigger efforts around life skills, there’s a lot of culture shift that has to happen. We’ve talked a little bit about all the consensus building that takes a lot of conversation. But one other aspect of that is also the connections and interactions with the communities and employers of graduates from the institution, so that surrounding community. Can you talk a little bit about the approach to culture shifts between the institution and other in the surrounding community?

Angela: Yeah, that’s a great question. That is something in higher ed that some disciplines or programs are very accustomed to doing, bringing leaders from their profession into the classroom to inform about different things, and then others don’t so much. And what we found at High Point University… let me tell you how this started and then how it grew. High Point University has a series known as the Access to Innovators series. The President has been very wonderful about connecting with well-known business leaders, thought leaders, bringing them to campus so that they can mentor students, and so that all began as part of this Access to Innovators series. But what was interesting is that the more they came to speak and meet with students, they talked a lot about life skills, and it sort of brought it all together in terms of the importance of what they were learning on our campus, and then how that connected with professional life. So I love that example about the importance of intentional connection with the professional community. Things are shifting so rapidly in terms of where we are as a society, what things look like in the workplace. With AI evolving in the way that it is, there are certain professions now that have just changed so profoundly, and now, talking with employers from those professions where AI has had a profound impact, often a theme I hear is they are focusing on those human skills, soft skills, the life skills that are all about people, because AI can do so many things, [LAUGHTER] but one thing that it can’t do is lead a team, inspire a team. There’s a level of human-to-human communication that has to happen. There’s got to be emotional intelligence. The way that we need to stay on top of all of that is through connecting with our students’ future employers. One example from Texas Women’s University is the extent to which we have a lot of graduate programs in the health professions which we have a national reputation for excellence in this these areas, in nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy. Nursing, in particular, what our Dean of Nursing is finding in meeting with clinicians, heads of hospitals, etc. is that AI is a thing in the workplace, and here are the ways in which we need your students to be prepared to be AI literate when they enter a clinical setting. And by the way, all of that changes all the time because of how technology is improving. Well, we wouldn’t know all that if we weren’t having these frequent interactions with the future employers of our students. They’re also currently providing clinical experiences for our students, so we’ve had those relationships also in the context of their educational process. But you get my point, that those connections are critical, and when you bring that into the classroom as well…. let’s say you have a business leader come to campus and meet with one of your classes about whatever life skill you choose, they can bring like, real-life tangible examples to tell you how this played out when I had an employee who wouldn’t respond to my feedback. Here’s how it impacted their work, and here’s how it impacted their career progression. And when you have like those tangible, real life in the moment examples that employers are providing to our students, there’s a level of engagement…. I don’t have any metric for measuring this, I’m just telling you what I see happen within the classroom. There’s maximal engagement. They love hearing those stories. So if we can do more to sort of reach beyond the ivory tower, and again, this is variable, many people are doing this already, but if we can sort of break down those barriers of communication between the academy and our students’ future professions, it’s better for everyone.

Rebecca: In addition to this culture shift involved with reaching out to the community and the potential employers of students or the employers that have traditionally employed people from your institution, you also mentioned that there’s a need for a bit of a culture shift in instructional approaches that are being used. Could you talk a little bit about how the shift has affected the way in which people are teaching?

Angela: Good question. That’s a good plug for my book, John, [LAUGHTER] because people often are finding that if they have a life skill mapped to their course, gosh, I don’t know how to teach emotional intelligence, so we’re having to retool some of the things that we do in order to learn this new facet of our teaching responsibilities within the classroom, and to do it in a way that we’re evidence based in how we go about it, like we’re learning from others experiences and maybe building on that and innovating on that. So, this is requiring that campuses provide more than just saying, “hey, teach this life skill in your course,” or “teach this workforce readiness in your course,” it means we have to provide professional development opportunities for our faculty, and sometimes that means also understanding that it might be a course retooling. They might need some time or resources to make that happen. It depends on how significant of a revision it is, but they need to feel supported in that effort, and not that it’s just like one more thing added to their plate. So there’s a lot of thought that has to happen on the part of academic leaders to make this possible in a way that gets people excited and passionate about a particular life skill and how that might play out for their students in a really positive way… also feeling supported in that endeavor, so they’re not just left with here’s all this extra work to do this, not really knowing how do I connect with people who know best how to teach this? We need to be bringing those experts to our campuses to meet with our faculty and coach them on this and also to provide space in people’s schedules to do the course retooling that might be necessary to make this happen.

Rebecca: You talked earlier a bit about how the life skill of teamwork might be incorporated into the life sciences. Can you provide another example of a different life skill and how that was built into the liberal arts curriculum?

Angela: So one outcome that High Point University had incorporated into its life skills learning outcomes for its liberal arts curriculum was ethical reasoning. So, you’ll look at employer surveys, often you’ll see one of the competencies they’re looking for, or one of the traits they’re looking for is someone that has the ability to reason ethically through a situation and determine its potential impact on certain individuals, the company as a whole, customers, etc. There are different views about how ethical reasoning should be taught within a liberal arts core. So some are very much wedded to the idea that it should be taught by philosophers who specifically had training in ethics and so forth, or perhaps in religion courses. And by the way, that’s what High Point University elected to do. So those ethical reasoning learning outcomes were mapped specifically to religion and philosophy courses that were a part of the liberal arts core. Now, other institutions take a different approach to embedding ethical reasoning into their courses, and I’m going to talk about a model that I cited in my book at James Madison University. You may have heard about their model of ethical reasoning that’s framed around eight key questions that you can ask yourself when you’re in a situation that gets you to consider all of the ethics-related facets of that situation. It’s a really great model. They’ve done some SoTL work to indicate that it has an impact on students’ ability to reason ethically through situations. So it is a very impressive method. What’s interesting about the eight key questions model, the 8KQ model, and by the way, it was philosophers who played a lead role in developing that model. They developed a model that could be implemented in any class, regardless of the disciplinary expertise of the professor. So I’m just throwing that out as another example where some institutions are embracing life skills that perhaps traditionally in the past have been very much isolated within a certain discipline, and moving it into a framework where it can be incorporated in other courses as well. Now James Madison, to my understanding, did not embed it into their core curriculum. It is a method that is simply being employed in courses within many disciplines. That was their QEP, by the way, ethical reasoning was their QEP a while ago, and that’s how the 8KQ framework was developed. So that’s another example of, specifically at James Madison University, how a life skills outcome, ethical reasoning, might be embedded into any course. You can imagine how useful that would be in courses like engineering or nursing. It would be useful in any discipline, but I’m just saying there are often courses, programs, disciplines, that are required to address ethical reasoning learning outcomes, even if it’s not a part of their core, they’re required by their accrediting body to have that embedded in their coursework somehow, and so that provides a really useful framework for folks in a variety of disciplines to incorporate ethical reasoning mastery into what they do in the classroom.

John: The approach you’re discussing in this book would probably work best if it was done across the board in an institution, some of us may be working in systems where the Gen Ed requirements are kind of dictated from above. I remember we spent several years coming up with our campus gen ed program, and then a year or so later, the SUNY system created a whole new overlay to that, which led to a lot of modifications. My point is that while the approach you’re suggesting would probably work best if it’s instituted across the board in an institution-wide manner, Gen Ed requirements don’t always change very easily, and while your book is a great resource for institutions that are going through a complete revision of their programs, might it also be a useful resource for individual faculty, departments, or programs that would like to integrate life skills more effectively in their individual courses and programs.

Angela: Yeah, that’s a really good point. John and I am a big fan of ensuring that every student gets exposure to these really impactful life skills outcomes by the time they graduate, which would mean, well, we’ve got to catch them in the courses that they all have to take, which is the core curriculum, the liberal arts core. But you are so right, if you are in a state system where your learning outcomes are dictated by… I’ll speak in Texas, we have a Texas Higher Ed Coordinating Board which sets out the competencies for our core curriculum, the learning outcomes for our core curriculum. And by the way, they emphasize a lot of workforce readiness skills, where there’s a lot of crossover with life skills. So I was excited to see that when I moved to Texas and took on this position, like teamwork, for example, or critical thinking, communication. But you know, even if you are in a different context, and that’s just not possible, aybe there’s not consensus among the faculty about wanting to incorporate these competencies into the core curriculum. This book, I think, is still incredibly useful, because it may be the case that you’re teaching a lot of STEM courses and you notice that your students may be struggling, maybe with imposter syndrome, like all the things that students often struggle with when they get into a STEM course in particular, but other challenging courses as well, you might want to think about doing some emotional intelligence lessons, because it can make students aware of those emotions and understanding where those emotions are coming from, and how they might manage them, and how they might facilitate emotions that would help them get beyond those feelings, to build up their self efficacy, their self confidence in their ability to be a scientist, in their ability to do science. So, even if you’re not at an institution where it’s possible to develop a liberal arts core that addresses these outcomes, yeah, this is useful to anyone, and not just 4-year institutions, 2-year institutions, I would argue, even high school teachers might find benefit from reading about some of the best practices that are outlined in these chapters for a particular life skill that they would really love to teach their students.

John: And what we haven’t emphasized is that you have a chapter on each of these life skills and effective ways of integrating that.

Angela: Yeah, and there are more life skills too, so maybe there will be a part two book. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So many life skills. [LAUGHTER]

Angela: So funny. When I look at my original outline for the book and how many I was going to address, I think I had like 12 chapters in mind, and you’ll notice it’s significantly shorter than that, because by the time you dig into a particular topic and lay out the theory and talk about the teaching and the assessment, it takes up a lot of words.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next? Maybe you’ve already teased a couple things.

Angela: Well, yeah, we’ll see… already in talking with folks about the topics covered in this book, those who have reviewed it and maybe provided an endorsement of the book, that there are other life skills, workforce readiness skills, NACE competencies, whatever you want to call them, that haven’t been addressed in the book. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for a part two. So that’s something that I’ve been thinking about, as time permits.

John: Thank you for joining us. It’s great to talk to you again, and this time, let’s not wait as long before our next conversation.

Angela: I would love that. Thank you so much, John and Rebecca, it was really fun to connect with you again and talk about stuff that we’re excited and passionate about. I love the work that we do in higher ed. So, yeah, it’s fun to sit back and celebrate some of the good work that’s happening.

Rebecca: Definitely. Thanks again for joining us.

Angela: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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