Welcome back to our STEAM Series. In the previous articles, we’ve explored what STEAM is, why it begins with questions rather than answers, and what makes a STEAM experience truly meaningful. But there is one question that naturally follows:

Where do the transversal skills actually develop?

It’s easy to imagine that skills like creativity, resilience or collaboration are something we teach through a dedicated lesson or classroom discussion. While those conversations certainly have value, my experience through the SPIRIT project has led me to see something different.

More often than not, transversal skills develop in moments.

Not planned moments.

Lived moments.

A tower collapses just before it is finished.

A team cannot agree on the best solution.

An idea that seemed perfect doesn’t work the first time.

A quieter child notices something everyone else has overlooked.

These are the moments where learning extends beyond academic knowledge and begins to shape the child as a person.

This is one of the greatest strengths of STEAM. Because the challenges are authentic, the skills children need are authentic too. They don’t practise resilience because we explain what resilience means. They practise it because their first design fails and they decide to try again. They don’t develop collaboration because they completed a worksheet together. They develop it because solving the problem genuinely depends on listening, negotiating and building on one another’s ideas. They don’t discover curiosity because we ask them to be curious. Curiosity appears naturally when a question matters enough that they genuinely want to know the answer.

One of the most important things I learned while developing the SPIRIT toolbox was that these moments should not remain invisible. Children benefit enormously when we help them recognise the skills they are using. A teacher might pause the activity and ask, “What helped your group keep going when your first idea didn’t work?” or “What did you do today that helped someone else?” Suddenly, children begin to realise they haven’t only learned something about science or engineering—they’ve also learned something about themselves.

This doesn’t mean interrupting every activity with long discussions. Sometimes a single thoughtful question at the right moment is enough. It helps children connect their experience to the language of the skill they are developing. Over time, that awareness allows them to transfer those skills into new situations, both inside and outside the classroom.

Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful aspects of STEAM. The activity is never only about building a bridge, investigating a phenomenon or designing a solution. Those are simply the contexts in which something much deeper is taking place. Children are learning how to persevere, communicate, empathise, think critically, adapt, create and care. They are discovering not only what they can do, but who they are becoming.

In our next article, we’ll explore another important question for teachers: Do transversal skills compete with curriculum objectives—or can they actually strengthen one another? As we’ll see, this is not a choice between academic learning and human development. The most meaningful classrooms often nurture both at the same time.