Why, when we are observing sessions are we not seeing the 6Cs embedded? Are they an abstract concept that staff struggle to apply to their subject? Do staff lack confidence in discussing the 6Cs? Is it just another thing that has been bolted on to a lesson? Are staff unconvinced of their significance?
Short of surveying 100s of staff only to get a less than 5% response rate I'm not sure I will find the answers to my questions. The 6cs have been determined as the core skills our students will need to succeed in the future world. They have been determined by countless surveys, statistical modelling and professors of social sciences. Look over the pond to educators in the USA and for 5 years + they have been developing these student skills. We need to embed them and catch up, fast!
There is a debate over what are the 6cs, as with everything there are lots of opinions. Originally beginning as 4, and those 4 haven't changed, they have now been expanded to 6. Ultimately though at this point in the game any focus on any of the core 4cs is a step towards preparing students for the future. The final 2cs switch in and switch out depending on who you read. We have read LOTS on the 6cs and we work from this list:
Communication
Collaboration
Creativity
Critical thinking
Choice
Curation
As a maths teacher I find it natural to embed most of them into every lesson. Creativity is hard to come by! But they naturally fit my lesson aims and my task design. All I do is amplify them in my planning. Who wouldn't want to develop a student who was a good team player with creative ideas, who could communicate well? Surely educators chose this career because they want to help shape students to be ready for their future?
If I was teaching Pythagoras I would model an answer at the board before we began the tasks. What about if I was teaching surds? Yes you guessed it, I would model how I would solve the problem. I would model the best example that I could, with the highest of high standards. As educators we consistently model the behaviour we want to see from our students. We have all said at some point, oh I can get away with wearing that un ironed top today and then found ourselves changing our minds as we leave the front door and racing back in to iron it because we want to model high standards! We have all said to a student "just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you can slam your desk, I wouldn't do that would I?" We model everything we want to see from our learners from behaviour to how we would answer a question. So why aren't we modelling the 6cs?
Communication
We communicate all the time. It would be impossible not to communicate. But do we communicate effectively? Not always! I know I often walk away from a lesson thinking, I wasn't clear enough when I said that. Or I leave a meeting thinking, oh I should have said less in there I waffled and lost my point. Sharing how we communicate with learners and how we construct our arguments is a powerful thing. After I lose my point when talking in class, I will, later on in the lesson, pull the class together to apologise and explain what I was trying to say and how it all went wrong. I share with them my strategies for effective communication.
When I am creating tasks I am communicating with learners. I am modelling how to communicate via text. I am showing them examples of how to create clear instructions, and ultimately how to communicate clearly. I am modelling communication. When I create comments on their work I am modelling effective communication (I hope?!) to embed communication into my lessons I need to build in opportunities for students to construct their arguments or communicate with peers.
Peer influences have long been known to have a postive multiplier effect since Hatiie first brought out effect sizes in the classroom. Petty agrees peer influences are key. I think it would be a challenge to now (10 years+ down the line) to argue against the positive effect of peer work or group work. But we all know how wrong group work can go, the same with peer assessment. "Good work" in peer assessment is not helpful. We need to, as educators, set the expectations of peer assessment. Create a model for students to assign roles in group work. We need to create and support opportunities for students to communicate effectively.
Collaboration
We collaborate all the time as teachers. We might work on classroom posters and displays together. We may work with others when designing the homework strategy for the year. We may even co plan units of work within the department. Yet all of this is behind the scenes. Our learners don't see this collaboration. How can we collaborate in the classroom? Or tell our learners how we collaborate?
I was singled out for praise for my collaboration with my in class support staff this year, as in previous years. I have been asked to attend an excellence event at work to share how I achieve such excellence. Unfortunately I disagree. I am not excellent at communicating with my in class support. I share my lesson plan, my resources and my slides with my in class support a week before the lesson. As I order my photocopying of my resources I ping an email with the links in to my in class support. They are all saved in a folder that is shared as well so if I make any changes they can see what's happening. Now my in class support may be a different staff member depending on rotas so I also copy in the team manager of the support team to disseminate. This isn't excellent. This is the bare minimum of human decency. You cannot ask anyone to help you at an event without sharing with them what the outline of the event will be. You can't hold a meeting expecting everyone to bring their best ideas without sharing an agenda of what is to be discussed. So why would you not share the lesson plan with your in class support?
The fact that I am recognised for excellence in this tells me that I am in the minority and this isn't common practice. If it were it would be a great example of collaboration to model to learners. Likewise if you have a student teacher taking an element of the lesson, great collaboration opportunity. And if the student teacher is taking the whole lesson, you can evidence collaboration by engaging in the lesson, rather than taking a break as so often I see.
What about the 'new normal' and blended teaching? As I have blogged previously I believe that in order to capture the feedback of the lesson in the best way, we will need co teachers to join us. We can show our learners collaboration in sharing other teachers recordings too. Imagine you are following the same scheme of work and week by week each teacher takes it in turns to record their lesson easing the pressure on the others that week. They then share that recording and the student ends up with a variety of different teachers recording to reflect on and go back too. The student will see different styles of communication as well as collaboration in action.
Creativity
It can be easy to prepare lesson slides, tasks or run with a lesson you have used year after year. It doesn't make it personal to that class nor if you have resitters does it engage them. Yet I see teachers going down the same road year after year. If I'm honest I have done this too! Simplifying fractions is always on the spec and I have a lesson that covers all bases and I could just go with it as is. But every year there are new statistics at the time of the lesson so I will change my examples to the number of people of BAME backgrounds out of The Times 100 richest people. I am creatively thinking of examples.
I read a lot of blogs, I mean a Lot of blogs. I have over 100 subscriptions to blogs, my inbox barely reaches zero. I like it like that though because the more you trawl what's out there the more golden nuggets that you find. I will see a new Hyperdoc template and think, wow that's good. I will creatively adapt it and use it in my lesson. I may read about a new delivery or questioning style. This may inspire me to create a new approach to scaffolding in my lesson. I am being creative in my approaches to teaching, I am coming up with my own new ideas based on what I see others doing. I am modelling creativity. I know this because year on year student survey feedback is that my lessons are the most creative the students see on their courses. I don't see myself as creative just that I am willing to have a go so no lesson feels stale.
Critical Thinking
I often sit in a CPD session listening and, on reflection decide whether or not it was for me. I critically evaluate the techniques or concepts the presenter was asking me to consider and I rationalise my own thoughts and think "OK but is it for me?" I critically think in meetings about plans for next year and I think, we may need to consider these factors too. I am creatively thinking of solutions and I then communicate them with the rest of the meeting. Critical thinking is part of everyday. We don't watch hair adverts and think, yes that is the best product for my hair! We critically think about the pros and cons of the products and whether it is for us.
We will have critically thought about all the ways of delivering our lesson and ultimately decided on what we feel is the best way. I take this a little further and I share with my learners the routes we could have gone down. I explain the pros and cons and consult them on whether they are happy to trust my judgement of if they want to explore another way. I realise this may not be appropriate for everyone but it is the way I embed critical thinking. If I had a debate subject where arguments could be judges I would have a more natural way to embed it too. We model critical thinking in every lesson, but do we tell our learners how the evidence and our thought process delivered us at our route?
Choice
Building on critical thinking naturally leads to choice. We had a choice in how to deliver our content and we made our choice. Yet we can still give the learners a choice too. When I teach ratio I teach 3 or 4 methods to solve exam problems. I give them a choice. They critically think about each method and choose the one that is right for them. Every learner learns differently and I ask them to respect this and let me explain all 4 choices before they choose. We choose what clothes we wear. We choose what we have for lunch. We choose our tasks.
We create options for tasks. We rarely adopt a one size fits all approach to tasks and we offer students a choice. I see good and less good examples of this in lessons all the time. The good explain the choice and what is expected and if there are varying levels of difficulty or not. The less good simply use the same tasks but phrased differently or on different coloured paper. Students had a choice to come to our lesson or not, yes there would be consequences if they chose the latter but they had a choice. We should reward that choice by continuing to offer them high quality choices throughout our lessons.
Curation
This is the skill that I am most passionate about developing for students. As a mum I see my son bombarded with videos and content on Netflix, YouTube Kids and hundreds of channels on Sky. How does he know what to watch? How does he know what is good? How do I help him curate the content? I see it as our responsibility as educators to help students curate the overwhelming amount of content that is available to them. Never mind it being a crucial skill needed for the future workforce.
We curate our resources before we begin the lesson. We choose what we think is a good example. We wade through Twitter and pick out shiny things that attract us or inspire us. We can successfully navigate the complicated world but do we take time to share our skills and expertise with our learners? We can, and do, curate but do we model it for our learners?
I was guiding my learners through revision recently and googled circle theorems. I then went through the results page verbally explaining my decisions for highlighting certain websites. UK based ones or gcse level ones rather than A Level and so on. My learners were scribbling down everything that I said. They enjoyed learning how I curate. I now know I need to model more of this for my future classes as well as getting them to curate as well.
I use Google Classroom as my hub for my classes. I keep it lean. I only post content that fits under one of my topics: algebra, number, shape, stats, revision and class admin. Sure I see new student websites daily that I could forward on to them but I would end up bombarding them and ultimately they would switch off. I was helping a teacher tidy up her Google Classroom last week and I asked her what she wanted to keep to copy for next year. Her response was, well all of it. How can all of it be relevant? She hasn't met next year's students, she doesn't know how they like to learn. How will next years students navigate this collection of ideas and resources? It needed curating. We do curation behind the scenes in class but we can model it more in class too, can't we?
I realise the aim of embedding the 6cs is to get learners to practise and develop the skills for themselves. But how can we do that and get their buy in if we are not modelling the skills first? We get that right and the rest should follow. SJ
