Understanding the Four C’s
What are the Four C’s, and why are they important to a Chromebook Classroom? Let’s take a QUICK LOOK in an effort to provide a basic overview of these concepts.
First, the Four C’s, that are essential components of a 21st-Century classroom, are:
Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity.
Why The Four C’s?
Think of the Four C’s as soft skills or character traits that enhance interpersonal capability and our success in working with other people. We need to incorporate these skills into our lessons, but they are more often cultivated rather than graded.
The skilled and intuitive educator finds a way to weave them into most lessons and purposefully adds opportunities for students to build these skills as part of classroom culture. We intentionally add them to the flow of learning that is happening in the classroom.
You may have surmised that these types of skills will be very important for students once they hit the workforce. For this reason, emphasizing including them in the early stages of student learning is vitally important to their future success.
When Google asked the business community what skills were important to the workforce, the results affirm that the 4C’s will play a crucial role in our students’ future work lives.
Source: Google for Education Presentation by @dstokes
Three Ways to Rethink Your Classroom with the Four C’s
- Have students work collaboratively as much as possible. Try pushing the boundaries of traditional learning by even allowing kids to work together on a final paper.
- If they can Google an answer on a test – let them. Broaden the ‘right answer’ definition to include multiple perspectives and deeper thinking.
- Allow students to ask questions first, before you begin a lesson or unit, to activate curiosity. Create a culture of student-generated questions, rather than always posing questions for students to answer.
Below is a brief explanation of the concepts followed by apps that could be used to amplify the process in the room.
While learning is not about the apps if you are designing learning scenarios you might consider how they might help to meet the learning goals. There are of course others apps you could use – and this is meant to be just a shortlist.
As you move through your journey of using the Chromebook for meaningful teaching and learning, consider adding these three C’s to your repertoire of good lesson design.
- Consumption – helping students have the information literacy they need to be better consumers of information.
Curation – helping students understand how to best curate information so they can find it again and use it for their own workflow.
Curiosity – allowing students the opportunity to be curious.
No matter how many C’s you can incorporate into your classrooms, their importance in the lives of our students can not be disputed and we must find a way to add these as often as we can.