Abstract

Soft skills of pre-service teachers during practice teaching (internship) in the cooperating schools are imperative, yet, none is known on their specific soft skills observed and reported by cooperating teachers (CT). This paper sought to provide information on the difference of the self-evaluated soft skills of pre-service (N=147) and their soft skills observed by CT (N=125) through convergent parallel mixed-methods design. Findings indicate that the most active self-evaluated soft skill of pre-service teachers is interpersonal skills, and the weakest is creativity and innovation. In contrast, the most observable soft skill by CT is Leadership skills, while interpersonal skill is the least observed. Furthermore, there is a significant difference in communication skills, critical thinking and problem-solving, lifelong learning, and management of information skills and interpersonal skills as to the pre-service teacher’s self-evaluation and CT’s observation of their soft skills through a Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test.

Key words: Soft skills, pre-service teachers, cooperating teachers, feedback, interpersonal, communicative skills, critical thinking and problem-solving