“Skills” in Education: The Perils of a Frequent Misnomer

kills is a word frequently used in education. Teachers strive to help students improve their listening skills, thinking skills, and problem-solving skills. Workbook authors design activities to help students practice skills such as classifying, inferring, and evaluating. Teachers themselves are expected to be able to acquire a set of teaching skills. List of critical thinking skills and decision-making skills can be found in curriculum guides, government education documents, and teachers' resource books. It may be, however, that the term skill is used incorrectly in many of these cases. Why does it matter? When I, as a teacher, look at a list of decision-making skills that I want my students to learn, what does it matter whether they are really skills? Undoubtedly, it is a good thing for my students to know how to infer and evaluate, whether I call these processes skills or not. In this article, I argue the contrary-that misuse of the word skill in education leads to misunderstandings of no small consequence. As my main example, I use the idea that teachers themselves can learn the skill of classroom decision making, along with various subsets of decision-making skills.