Making Students Aware of the 4Cs

This post is week 3 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators from hotlunchtray.com. Find out more by clicking here.

I am constantly thinking about the "4Cs of the 21st Centruy" when I work with students or coach teachers. The 4C skills are: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, and Critical Thinking. 

According to many, like P21.org, these are the skills that our students need to be successful in the current workplace, as well as the workplace they will walk into. Until recently, I hadn't put too much thought in making the students fully aware of how classroom activities are developing these skill sets for them. Yes, I've shared with students before how their time at school should and will be spent developing these skills along with learning content, but I don't promote them on a daily basis with students. I plan on making this change for my learners in the coming school year.

It is common practice to display the student learning objectives for the students in every lesson. Along with those objectives, I'm going to begin displaying a 21st Century Skill objective for them as well. The idea being that by the second semester of the school year, students themselves will be able to identify which skill they are developing. To me this doesn't have to be a major shift in anything my colleagues and I are currently doing. Some examples of this could look like:

These are two pretty basic statements that I can post for students, but they could make them aware of the fact that we are working on these skills.