The Four C's: Making 21st Century Education Happen

What might the 21st Century skills for learning be?  What it is that schools, leaders and educators must do to make 21st Century Education happen?  What are we doing with the valuable time that we, as educators, have with children and young people?  The video clip below is based on the lived experience of a whole school district that is committed to develop these four important and essential skills for any 21st century student - Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication.  These skills are incorporated not only in the curricular content and pedagogy adopted to facilitate the learning process, but are also embedded in school leaders', mentors' and teachers' way of learning and interacting with each other and with their students.  The four C's inform and also serve as the driving force behind professional development, planning and assessment.  

I believe that such an approach could be applied at all levels of education, adjusting it and making it fit both the cultural and educational context of a particular school, district or college.  The new Maltese National Curriculum Framework includes all four C's within each level of education - the challenge now is for us to find effective ways to work together nationally and locally, implementing these ideas, skills and attitudes in practice.  

Engaging Learners by Working on Projects using TASC Wheel

There are undoubtedly many effective ways of working on projects in a classroom, and the educational arena is full of ideas and suggestions about where to start, what to do and how to go about working on a project.  The use of creative and critical thinking skills is definitely one integral aspect of project-based learning, as are collaborating with others and the moving from one step or task to another, reflecting and evaluating throughout the process.  Project-based learning is more about the process than the final product and creates room for children to start from what they know, to reflect on where they would like to go and to make informed choices through collaborative work with others (both adults and peers).  It is also ideal for the educator who wishes to link learning across subjects and areas of learning, and who is interested in embedding inclusive practices that support and scaffold the learning for those children who struggle in certain areas whilst providing plenty of rich opportunities for those who can reach higher levels of attainment.

 

Working with groups of six to seven-year olds over the past three years, I have found the TASC framework very useful in developing important skills and attitudes that help children to grow into independent, creative and motivated learners who are able to ask questions, work through tasks in collaboration with others, make use of the tools and artefacts available in the classroom environment and work at their own pace and level.  TASC stands for Thinking Actively in a Social Context, a thinking framework developed by Belle Wallace.

A typical classroom project would start off as a unit linked to our current theme.  For example, working through the popular theme of Habitats, the children demonstrated a keen interest in camouflage and spotted animals so we decided to explore this further.  The title 'Spots and Stripes in the Animal Kingdom' was chosen and the project took off, promising from its very conception to be an exciting cross-curricular venture.  The first step was to start by asking the question What do we know about this? in which children are asked to gather ideas and organise them using mind-mapping (plenty of words and pictures to draw a map of current knowledge, ideas and concepts).  Next we identified the task for this project and, after discussing a variety of options and end-products, we decided to create individual lap books (we reached this consensus after considering to create a group lap book but all children wanted their very own to take home and therefore I let them go ahead with the choice they had made, placing only a demand on them - that of collaborating with a partner to provide support to each other).

During the next phase, the children generated ideas by asking the question How many ideas can I think of? focusing on the different sections they could include in their lap books.  Children collaborated with others sitting on the same table (groups of four or five) and then shared their ideas with others.  Each child eventually choose their own list of sections by asking the next question in the TASC wheel entitled Decide - Which is the best idea? This is when I wrote a post on our classroom blog, asking for materials and pictures that the children could use to create their lapbooks.  The response from home was a very good one, as always, and the children returned to school armed with a variety of resources they could use to make their lap books as attractive, informative and creative as they wished.  

Now it was time for the most exciting part of the project - the phase called Implement It!  The children worked happily on their projects, asking for help from peers or adults (myself as their teacher and the LSA in our classroom) when needed - the level of engagement and the kind of learning that took place cannot be easily explained in words although anyone entering the classroom during the sessions dedicated to the project would undoubtedly sense an atmosphere of solid, unequivocal, engaged learning taking place.  Children made use of a variety of tools and resources to work through the project including information books, online resources, dictionaries, word banks and so on.  

The final steps in the project encourage children to reflect and evaluate their performance and the process whilst sharing their work with an audience. We asked questions such as What did we find out? Did we learn something new? Did I work effectively? Are we proud of what we've achieved? What could we have done differently? It is a pleasure to watch how children, as young as six and seven, can evaluate and discuss their work and that of others in a constructive way - making sure that they always begin with a positive followed by suggestions for improvement, if they have any.  The sharing with others is a favourite part of each project and, in this case, the children shared their project with a partner, reading through their own and their partner's sections in the lap book and finally taking it home to share with their families.

If you'd like to find out more about this effective thinking framework, go to the official website: http://www.tascwheel.com/  Here's a taste of the ideas behind the TASC framework:

Small poppies ... learning to learn in the 21st century

"So that tall poppies can lift their heads to the sky ..."

Small Poppies ... Learning to Learn in the 21st Century

"So that tall poppies can lift their heads to the sky ..." - these words are taken from the title for my upgrade paper which I presented at the end of the second year of my PhD studies.  Why use the analogy of 'poppies' to describe the experience of young learners in the classrooms of nowadays?  Well, I borrow this analogy from M Gross (1999) who adopted the analogy of 'tall poppies' to describe the experience of gifted children in the early years.  In her paper published in Roeper Review (Vol 21, No. 3), Gross talks about the 'cutting down to size of children who develop at a faster rate or attain higher levels of achievement than their age peers'.  

I would extend the analogy of 'small poppies' to the whole community of learners in schools that are succumbing to the pressures of current policies of standardization, regulation, testing and accountability in Malta and Europe designed to ensure that all learners meet minimal expectations.  Such a climate is pushing school leaders and teachers towards a kind of educational practice that values uniformity and standardization to the detriment of creativity, motivation and talent development for both teachers and students.  

Unfortunately, this 'cutting down to size' or trimming of poppies so that the educational field (school or classroom) looks uniform and tidy, practical and easy to handle is allusive to current educational practices that are still present in our schools despite much talk about differentiation, inclusion and quality education for all.  Our 'small poppies' would like to lift their heads to the sky by being provided with opportunities for meaningful learning to take place through a variety of learning experiences that take into consideration who they are as individuals, where they are coming from, what they already know and what they would like to learn, amongst other things.    

So this educational blog is not about giftedness or the 'gifted' learners in our schools, although my interest in this area has been the driving force for my investigation into those factors that facilitate the unveiling and nurturing of emerging abilities, gifts and talents in young learners.  It is about education in the 21st century, about finding ways to motivate, inspire and equip children with those essential skills necessary for them to develop into independent and enthusiastic learners.  It is about building positive learner identities so that children view themselves as capable learners who can overcome any obstacles that might hinder their progress or stifle their emerging abilities.  It is about believing that every child has the potential to learn and that school leaders, teachers and parents can work together to create enabling and supportive learning environments.

And I must conclude this first blog post with a quote by Albert Einstein who, more than a century ago, highlighted the way in which education might be playing a role in stifling children's inquisitive nature to discover, to venture and to learn:

"It is in fact nothing short of a miracle, that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom, without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."