The views of faculty members about life skills

The aim of this study is to find out faculty members' perception of life skills, how they evaluate their educational activities in terms of life skills, and to see how they evaluate the sufficiency of trainee teachers' life skills. The method of the research is the phenomenology of the qualitative research patterns. The study group consists of 28 faculty members of Faculty of Education of a public university in the spring semester of 2018-2019 academic year. The data of the study was collected with a semi-structured interview form. The data of the research were analyzed through content analysis, one of the qualitative analysis methods. According to the results of the research, faculty members use the concept of life skills in many areas in their lives, also they internalize these skills with their own study areas. Faculty members think that life skills can be acquired/improved afterwards. Participants also believe that individuals need these skills in every aspect of their lives, and the lack of life skills can cause problems in areas like family, profession, social life, etc. Participants think that most of the life skills develop with their own in-class and extracurricular activities, but trainee teachers' ability to cope with stress and emotions does not develope sufficiently. While many of the faculty members believe that life skills of trainee teachers developes/partially developes with in class and extracurricular activities, others argues that life skills do not develop enough with those activities. The participants also state that there are some factors that limit these skills. Most of the participant state that their life skills have improved during the time they spend in the faculty, but some of them think the opposite is true. While most of them believe that trainee teachers should have all the life skills when they start their first year of the Faculty of Education, some of them argue that it is enough to have some of these skills to begin with. Faculty members find the current skills of trainee teachers quite inadequate, also most participants think that trainee teachers do not have any of these skills. While the majority of the faculty members state that trainee teachers have graduated with all or some of the life skills, some of them believe that they have graduated without any skills at all. Lastly, faculty members made some suggestions to improve the life skills of trainee teachers.