Learning Soft Skills Through Group Discussion

Group Discussions (GD) are a robust way to teach not only communication skills to the students but also non-verbal communication, difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness, how to be polite, how to put across your points, how to encourage the reticent participants, etc. GD has been an important component of ‘soft skills for professionals’, course offered to second and third year engineering students at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. This paper focuses on the objectives of teaching the theory of GD and highlights the learning outcomes after all the GDs were conducted in the class.