SKILLS21 is on hold for the 2024/25 academic year. If you have questions about recognition of your participation, please email myinvolvement [at] mcgill.ca.
Discovery Stream
Promoting innovation, creative thinking, and responsible decision making in a variety of contexts.
Workshops in the discovery stream focus on the following skill areas:
Perspective Taking
Students will be able to:
- Identify the value of alternative perspectives and ideas.
- Assess the strengths and weaknesses of alternative perspectives and ideas.
- Evaluate questions or problems by considering the history of the problems, reviewing logic/reasoning, examining feasibility of solutions, and weighing impacts of solutions.
Curiosity
Students will be able to:
- Seek out and identify the value in new and unusual information or questions.
- Engage in and find value in inquiring, investigating and testing new information or ideas.
- See the value in life-long learning.
Information Literacy
Students will be able to:
- Apply creative thinking, systems thinking, reflective thinking, and/or strategic thinking to explore questions and/or ideas in original ways.
- Access information online (e.g., using databases and search engines) and offline (e.g., community sources).
- Distinguish among information grounded in experience, expertise, and/or authority.
- Evaluate the credibility of information and manage conflicting information.
Risk Taking
Students will be able to:
- Identify when they are risk averse.
- Identify the consequences of taking a risk and/or potential failure.
- Think about risk in positive and negative terms.
- Seek out and follow through on untested directions or approaches.
- Learn from their mistakes.
- Manage stress and failure to build their resiliency.
Decision Making
Students will be able to:
- Identify the difference between their personal goals, what they are able to do, and what is right to do when making decisions.
- Identify and be sensitive to contextual factors to make responsible decisions.
- Propose multiple solutions to a single question or problem.
- Make decisions in situations where there is no defined "right and wrong".
While this web page is accessible worldwide, McGill University is on land which has served and continues to serve as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. Teaching and Learning Services acknowledges and thanks the diverse Indigenous peoples whose footsteps mark this territory on which peoples of the world now gather. This land acknowledgement is shared as a starting point to provide context for further learning and action.