The 4 important C’s of teaching – Revista Didactica Genesis

Teaching is all about preparing students for the future. The problem is that as technology and society progresses at such a rate, it is no longer possible to prepare students for individual careers. Today’s teachers need to prepare students for the a career which does not yet exist.

This is where the 4 C’s come into play. The 4C’s are:

Communication
Creative thinking
Critical Thinking
Collaboration

In this short article, I will look at the importance of each of these key strands in turn.

How to promote communication within the classroom

Communication is key. The students need to progress from writing to talking and explaining their ideas. In lots of classrooms, there is a set text book, which in the past was great. All the information was within the pages, as long as a student started at the beginning of the book and worked studiously through all the pages, they would leave the lesson with more information than when they started.

However, students now need to do so much more than what is within a text book. The text book has moved from being the main teaching tool into a much less important supporting player. Students need to develop their skills as confident communicators.

How can a teacher improve a students communication skills?

The first is to introduce the students to Glogging. This is a great piece of software from Glogster.com. This software is somewhere between a poster and a PowerPoint presentation, but it allows students to add lots of images, text and videos to their written work.

I focus each week on one of the parts of a lesson I want students to know more about, then I set them the homework task of creating a Glog page. This is a wonderful tool as the students and their parents can work together to research and develop the teaching tool. In the following lesson, the students can then stand up in front of the class and explain what they have learnt and written about and why. The students present their presentations and take up to 3 questions from their classmates. In this way, as well as learning more about the subject and letting parents feel they are part of the learning process, the students also learn how to express themselves clearly and confidently.

It must be added that not all computers work with Glogster and the Internet can be slow, so I also let them create paper versions to present, making wonderful, weekly displays.

How can a teacher boost creative thinking?

What is the difference between a British Education and a Romanian education? The answer is the level of creative thinking the students need to complete to achieve their final goals.

I love Romanian education, I love how much information students to need to acquire and remember and I think this is very useful. However, in reality, it is also sadly becoming outdated. If students need to find out information, they now have Google and Wikipedia directly in their phones. They no longer need to know the names and populations of every major capital in Europe, Google tells them. However, what skill students do need, and I have noticed lots of Romanian students lack, is creative thinking.

There are two ways of teaching maths for example. The first way, is the traditional method. You teach a skill such as fractions and then the students practice page after page of fractions using the new skills. They become confident they know this skill and so everyone moves on. So where is the problem? The problem is that when they reach their final exams, they have been taught so many strategies but no creative thinking, so when they see questions in the test papers, they don’t know how to approach them. The alternative way, which is the way I really love, is to give them creative problems and then as a team discuss how they are able to solve the problems using a mix of skills they already have, and the occasional focused teaching input to make sure they are still learning more ideas.

The post-school results are really fascinating. Students who use the creative thinking approach admit to still be using these skills long into their later life and they use these skills naturally in their workplace. As a result, they climb the career ladder faster and are more successful. Those taught the traditional method, learn the method, pass the exam (if they are lucky) and then promptly forget them as irrelevant. So lots of years of learning and teaching are lost almost immediately.

How to improve a students creative thinking.

Students need to be given more open ended problems and open ended stories. The students need to think about the different strategies they can use to solve or expand on a problem.

Creative thinking can also be really be boosted by taking a geography or a science problem and then performing a Thinking Hats task on the problem. In this method, students need to think about what is good about an idea, what is negative about the solution or problem, what facts are present and how it will make people feel. In addition the students need to think about how they will use this information in the future and how they could use their final results in a more creative way. In the final point the students need think about how they can build on their ideas such as change the end of a story or develop a new product using their ideas. Students really enjoy these approaches and also become more creative without effort. The perfect solution!

Why is Critical Thinking important?

Critical thinking is another way students can refine and develop their knowledge pools. There are now so many different sets of conflicting reports and pieces of information around us, that with using a critical thinking approach, a student is almost certainly going to be swamped with information from different groups.

An example is looking at how different news groups report the same news story – the ideal channels being BBC, Russian Today (RT) and CNN. Each will present the same story in a similar way, each presenting the facts which suit their audiences the best. The students then have the task of thinking about what is each media group getting from the story and why? Often they will try to present one of countries being reported in a negative light, and their own country in a more positive light. This is the key to critical thinking.

How to make students into more critical thinkers.

Likewise, students need to learn how to become more critical thinkers in relation to their own work. Students need to think about how they can improve their work. Students need to learn that any work should only be ever considered a “work in progress” and that every piece of work is capable of improvement. P.G Wodehouse (a very famous British writer) had a wonderful system to improve his critical thinking. He read through each page of his writing and placed it accordingly on the wall of his room. Pages near the bottom where needing more work, pages higher up were closer to his perfection. At the end, all the pages needed to be touching the roof of his study to be published.

In Britain, there are lots of different Big Writing schemes, which hand out points for every different writing device included in a piece of writing. It focuses on the different aspects of the written piece, from content, to spelling and grammar to structure, and helps students to make sure that they have included all the key features of the work. In addition, students can work in pairs to check each other’s work. A fresh pair of eyes is essential in spotting new ideas.

Another great way of improving writing is using VCOP – which mean vocabulary, connectives, openers and punctuation. These are also another way of developing a good self-critical way of creating better work.

Another idea ties into the first idea. Encourage students to creative criticise each other’s presentations and suggest improvements. Was the presentation too long? Did it have too much text? Did the speaker speak, slowly, clearly and confidently? It is even better if yo video the talks and so everyone can discuss them together.

Finally, again this is another place to use the Thinking Hats – let student to think of an idea and then ask them to put on their “Black Hat” and think of all the negative aspects of their ideas. What could go wrong with the idea? How could their ideas negatively impact on others and then get them to think of ways of resolving this problem.

Why is collaboration important?

Collaboration is key in every day life and yet not in the classroom. Almost everything today is developed as part of a large team. Even modern inventors almost always work as parts of a team – the days of a single inventor working in a shed somewhere is almost over. Students need to know how to work in a team effectively.

Team work is a very under-rated part of the classroom. The students often are encouraged to work silently from their text books, at a stretch working in pairs with their desk mate if they are really stuck. I first expanded if this to a simple rule of if you don’t know something, ask three before you ask me! This means a student with a simple problem would ask three other students in the class his question and if they still did not know the answer, then they could come and ask me.

Another key thing about team work is to make sure that the teams a constantly being mixed, it could sometimes be sorted by ages, or sexes or tables. The key thing being that every student gets to work with every other student at some point. Differences between the students are rigorously policed and there is a score including how inclusive a team was. Teams which penalise one of their own is strongly penalised in the scoring system. In addition the different members of the team as assigned different roles, which rotate so everyone experiences being a leader, a team worker, a coordinator and any other role you care to think of.

The students can again create presentations. This time, the students are working as part of a team. I actually like the students to work in different colours, so I can see what each member of the team has contributed to the work. The students enjoy working together. You need to accept that there will be a lot more noise than normal, things will be a lot slower than normal and there will be endless arguments within a team. However some of the work the students produce are simply mind boggling and you get to feel that all this additional noise and stress was worth it in the end.

I also like to use teams for end of unit quizzes or for revision. I have found students are much happier to discuss the different answers with each other, rather than with the teacher. The students like to discuss ideas and present their own answers. Anything which gets a student talking and thinking is perfect with me.

In conclusion

I think you can now see each of these ideas actually overlap with each other idea in the classroom. The ideal solution is to plan in the 4Cs into each of your lessons to make sure that your students have a richest possible experience, which in turn leads better learning, improved confidence and more fun.

I use this in all my classes and I would highly recommend anyone else who relies too heavily on text books to also look into this idea and think about how they could use these ideas in their own classroom.