Soft Skills and Leadership. Debate as Pedagogical Tool

EasyChair Preprint 15680

Abstract

Soft skills are characterised by social-emotional skills, relevant for individual growth, community engagement, academic and work achievements, and are theoretically in contrast to job-specific technical skills. Higher Institutions are now called to adapt to the requirements of a changing and highly complex labour market, in which it is important to promote the employability of university graduates and to educate future workers who possess soft skills in addition to technical skills. The University of Roma TRE has originated a theoretical and methodological reflection on the evaluation and the development of soft skills in its students, by including a Laboratory for Leadership in the Master's module Leadership and Humanistic Management. The Laboratory consists in a critical analysis of some famous lectures given by notable speakers working on various fileds; students are then guided to construct their own debate by choosing from the different topics proposed. The 40 Master's degree students from different degree courses enthusiastically submitted their debates. The assessment result of the soft skills detected in the post-test phase after the lab, along with the linguistic analysis of the forms used to express intentions and skills also in a foreign language, significantly improved the students' perception of their own leadership skills in the communication area. The conclusions bring to light a critical re-examination of how to train soft skills, the debating tool being functional not only for communication and language skills, but also for the choice of a leadership style.

Keyphrases: Debate, FL/SL communication skills, leadership skills, pedagogical tools, soft skills

@booklet{EasyChair:15680,
  author    = {Raffaella Leproni and Valeria Caggiano},
  title     = {Soft Skills and Leadership. Debate as Pedagogical Tool},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15680},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2025}}