4 C's of 21st Century Living

The education community, myself included, is all about the 4 C's of 21st Century Learning right now. The 4 C's are: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. These are believed to be the most important skills that students must develop through their education to be successful as adults. It's pretty much an alliterative list of what most teachers teach daily.

There is also a big SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) push in the education community. Social Emotional Learning helps students to understand their emotions, connect them to their actions, and understand the emotions and actions of others to be more empathetic people. I've been trying to develop the 4 C's of 21st Century Living which would cover the SEL part of education. I do love alliteration! Here's what I've got so far: compassion, courage, confidence, and curiosity. Thoughts?

Just as we encourage students to use their skills or creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration to be successful adults, we should encourage students to compassionate, courageous, confident, and curious to be happy adults.

Teaching with the 4 C's

I have made a very conscious effort to increase my thoughtful implementation of the 21st Century Skills into my curriculum. True, every teacher will offer creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication within their curriculum, often without trying, but I wanted to make sure that I am focusing on these skills in purposeful ways.

Anyway, we completed our big reading projects for our Fall Battle of the Books recently. Students must read at least 4 books from a list of 12 within about 2 months. The book list is varied in terms of interest, genre, and ability, so most students find at least one book that they absolutely love. Our final reading projects were very open-ended. The only requirements were that students presented a summary of the most important plot points and a description of the main characters. Students could choose to work individually or with 1 or 2 friends. They could also present the information in any way that they wanted. I was so excited for presentation day!

While there were still a high number of Google slideshows, there were also some extremely creative skits, songs, drawings, and even a video game using Scratch! (We had recently completed our Hour of Code with Code.org and one student definitely found his passion!)

My teacher goal of 2017: more student choice and more open-ended assignments to foster the natural growth of 21st century skills.