The reinvention of training: hard skills/soft skills and mad skills

Khalid Barkaoui
Today, the world is moving at breakneck speed. This change requires adaptation and innovation. Our schools must not escape this dynamic of change. A change in terms of pedagogy, didactics, governance, leadership and management for greater efficiency and productivity. This change must be driven by highly qualified young executives. In order to qualify this staff who are anxious to introduce the expected change, it is necessary to question the nature of the training provided to the teaching and administrative staff.
This new formation should focus attention on the following trio:
Les hard skills
Les soft skills
Les mad skills
In this context, I will focus on the training that a future teacher of the 21st century must have to successfully carry out the project of a modern, equitable, qualitative and inclusive school.
Training centers are called upon to further develop hard skills, namely disciplinary skills and appropriate knowledge likely to provide new recruits with professional skills. These required skills are the optimal condition to exercise the profession with passion and professionalism. Roughly speaking, the first mission of a training center is to expand the technical skills and the priority knowledge for the exercise of the teaching profession.
Then, a great interest must be taken in soft skills to provide the new teacher with fair values ​​such as the ability to solve complex problems through collaboration, team spirit, emotional intelligence, empathy, communication , conflict management, adaptability, innovative and creative spirit as well as critical thinking.
Teaching centers are required to take a keen interest in mad skills. Have you ever heard of these new and atypical skills commonly called crazy skills?
In addition to hard skills and soft skills, there are mad skills. These skills often emerge outside the professional framework to give a unique impetus and find new and original responses to the heterogeneity of the class.
For this reason, the trainer must put the trainee in situations of failure and situations of difficulties and learning disabilities to lead him to find ways out for the dyslexic, the autistic, the trisomic, the one who has difficulty deciphering a syllable or a letter, or one who has difficulty memorizing or concentrating in class, or students with high intellectual potential and who have difficulty adapting to the school context… In short, it is urgent to transform training, to take it out of the theoretical framework and inevitably direct it towards practice. Our training centers must rehabilitate the centers of interest, the hobbies or the passions of the educational actors by inviting them to devote themselves openly to sport, to voluntary work in an associative structure or to an artistic discipline to develop in them perseverance, tenacity, collective work, anticipation, curiosity and the ability to listen attentively and actively.
We have great need these days of an atypical profile: a committed, passionate, active and fervent teacher… Character traits are increasingly sought after to accompany this overhaul of our national school which has begun a new stage based on the implementation of the clauses of framework law 51.17 and the implementation of the twelve commitments of the 2022/2026 roadmap.
To meet this new challenge, it is necessary to train and support the teaching staff in order to provide them with a panoply of skills such as the ability to communicate with ease, planning skills, time and space management. They must also be supplied with motivational skills, skills in the use of digital technology, intercultural skills and skills in research and autonomy to be able to work in synergy and with self-sacrifice in order to achieve convincing results.
The stakes are high and the overhaul of our school is essential, particularly after the publication of the alarming results of the 5th edition of PIRLS 2021 where our country ranked 56th out of 57 countries that took part in this international evaluation study. . 59% of our 4 AEP/CM1 students are below the minimum level of reading proficiency. A critical situation to ponder in more ways than one.
Khalid Barkaoui
Member of the AMEF CP de Boulemane