Covid-19 and a spotlight on racism remind us how 21st Century Competencies can help our students get through tough times.

Let’s empower our students with transferable life skills as we teach “the curriculum.”

• This stuff isn’t just for homeroom or advisory teachers.
• It’s for everyone teaching elementary, middle or high school.
• Life skills are something we can consciously embed into our day-to-day teaching. (Not just the teachable moments when they arise.)

Check out the Mega Bundle to save you time and money.

Want to know why I’m so passionate about teaching 21st Century Learning Skills? Because they helped save my life.

Teaching in the “new normal”

Since we’re in a “new normal”, let’s wonder how else we could prepare our students for the future.

Watch the video.

https://youtu.be/SSKtvFU5adk

We live in a global world connecting people and places in ways that we can’t even imagine. (And, that’s even after seeing what the pandemic can do!)

Life today is different from life when we were growing up.

• I remember life before the internet.
• I remember dial up internet and dot-matrix printers.
• I remember life before social media.
• I remember life when cell phones were gigantic bricks

And I’m in my 40s. I taught in a grade 8 classroom for over 12 years.

And if I look around the staff room, there are teachers who are older than me and teachers who are younger than me.

• Some of my teaching colleagues tell me about a world where the television was black and white.
• Some of my teaching colleagues never had to watch a TV show because it aired at a specific time.

Teachers, like everybody else, have unconscious bias. We teach what we know from when we grew up.

And, we don’t want to change. (Most people don’t.)

But, we can also recognize our unconscious bias and work to learn about skills and competencies that our students will need to have to thrive in the global unknown.

We got this!

Teach using the 6 Cs of Education:

• Instead of focusing on teaching knowledge and content and how to study for tests,
• focus on transferable life skills / growth mindset to explore the curriculum.

It’s a subtle difference, but it makes all of the difference in getting our students ready to face the unknown. (instead of just memorizing facts and definitions.)

21st Century Global Competencies and 21st Century Global Skills all revolve around a similar concept about preparing our students to not just survive, but thrive in life.

Technically speaking, although we often use 21st Century Competencies and 21st Century Skills interchangeably, some people who have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue want us to know that Competencies and Skills are different things.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organization that works to build policies that result in better lives. They have an executive summary defining and selecting key global compentencies and here’s how they define 21st Century Global Competencies:

A competency is more than just knowledge and skills. It involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobilising psychosocial resources (including skills and attitudes) in a particular context. For example, the ability to communicate effectively is a competency that may draw on an individual’s knowledge of language, practical IT skills and attitudes towards those with whom he or she is communicating.

OECD, The Definition and Selection of Key Competencies Executive Summary. Link

Bottom Line: They’re a set of transferrable skills that we need to teach our students to help them be successful in life – whether that’s in a competitive global reality, or in their local communities.

Yup. I hear you. We talk about this difference in our Challenge Task.

In my school board, we called them 6 Cs of Education.

The province of Ontario was moving towards redesigning their learning skills on the report card to reflect these six competencies. (The Ontario government has a fantastic document towards defining 21st Century Competencies for that province.)

But, depending on where you are, you might know these 6Cs as

• 21st Century Global SKILLS or
• 21st Century Global COMPETENCIES.

(Same, same, but different.)

In your part of the world, you may be teaching your students about the

• 4 Cs of 21st Century Learning ( Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Critical Thinking )
• the 7 C Skills (Cross Cultural Understanding, Career and Learning Self-Reliance, Computing and ICT Literacy, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Creativity and Innovation, Communication, Information and Media Literacy.)

Maybe you talk about 21st Century Skill Clusters (Career and Learning Self-Reliance, Digital Age, Effective Communication, Inventive Thinking, High Productivity)

Or, maybe you just talk about the 6 Cs of Education.

Essentially, the 6 C’s of Education are a bunch of transferable 21st Century competencies that you can use at school, at home, at a job… pretty much anywhere. Now, and in the future.

The world is changing and we need to help our student develop skills, strategies, and a growth mindset that will help them to be successful in the 21st century.

Covid-19 was an unexpected twist that showed how interconnected our world really is. There are no easy solutions to this real-world problem.

But, the reality is there will be other unexpected problems and obstacles. Whether we’re talking about global problems, local problems, or personal problems, I think we can all agree that the future is unknown.

A Growth Mindset is a key component of these 6 Cs. We need to encourage growth mindsets in our students through our lessons as we deliver the curriculum.

There are 6 Cs of Education. (They are also called 21st century skills / 6 Cs / 21st Century Competencies.)

• Character
• Citizenship
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Creativity (and innovation)
• Critical Thinking

The 6 Cs represent a paradigm shift in education. Instead of focusing on acquisition of content and knowledge, the emphasis is placed on the acquisition of transferable skills and a growth mindset which can be applied to different contexts:

• learning subject-based content at school
• learning how to navigate the relationships in our lives: personal relationships, romantic relationships, work relationships
• learning how to achieve our life goals . (Psst – this is more than just making New Year Resolutions, but that’s a start…) . (Psst – this is more than just making New Year Resolutions, but that’s a start…)
• learning how to live in an unpredictable world where Covid-19 can literally shut down cities and countries
• learning how to express ourselves and deal with an unfair world like where George Floyd’s death shines a spotlight
• learning how to keep going when we face impossible obstacles.

Why we need 21st Century Learning Skills – a case study

I had a mental health crisis when I was a Grade 8 Teacher at Longfields Davidson Heights Secondary School in Ottawa, Canada.

I taught Grade 8 for over 13 years and I loved it. Teaching was my passion. People would ask me when I was going to head down the road and become a principal. The reality is, I loved tinkering in my classroom laboratory and I didn’t want to give that up to become an administrator. Teaching was life.

Then, something happened at my school, and I am no longer fit to teach in the classroom. But, my story doesn’t end here.

My mental health crisis doesn’t end in tragedy. You won’t read about me in the newspapers. (Wait… are there still newspapers? Scratch that. You won’t see me on your news feed…)

I am choosing to write my own narrative and choose my own path.

Part of that path means recognizing that I choose my mindset. I can have a fixed mindset and believe that I can’t change. Or, I can have a growth mindset and as hard as it seems, try to find a way to make the worst moment of my life into the greatest moment.

Thinking, learning and creating lesson plans about 21st Century competencies is helping me to develop skills and attitudes to take the worst moment of my life, and somehow figure out how to turn it into the best moment in my life.

I’m sharing this story with the world because sometimes, when it comes to mental health, we are surrounded by a single story of violence and tragedy.

We get a skewed view of reality because we are bombarded by sensational stories – in the media, on social media, and sometimes, even in school plays.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of a single story in her TED talk. We create a single story when we

“…show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become… The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story

It is often easier to talk about physical health than mental health. It’s easier to talk about our daughter breaking her leg while playing hockey rather than talking about our son who has depression and attempted suicide.

So, then, we don’t share our stories about mental health. Our stories of struggle, our stories of resilience, and our stories of accepting a new normal.

In the silence, then, the only stories we do hear about are about shootings, suicide, and tragedy.

The reality is, we need a balance of stories.

Ultimately, we need to reject the single story that extreme bullying leads to extreme violence and that mental health crisis leads to tragedy.

I share my story of struggle in the hopes that it helps someone else get through theirs.

There’s never a good time to stand up and be counted. But, I posted my video about what happened to me during Mental Health Awareness Month. I wanted to take the opportunity to get real and get loud about mental health .

• 0:00 – Warning. This video discusses depression and violence. It may not be appropriate for all viewers.
• 0:42 – What is Mindset? Fixed Mindset vs #GrowthMindset
• 2:00 – Four levels of strategies
• 4:47 – 21st Century Learning Competencies / Skills
• 5:35 – We are surrounded by a single story of violence
• 5:53 – What happened to me at LDHSS
• 9:51 – We need a balance of stories. Why we need to get real and get loud about mental health

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9RAAN_jPAQ&t=287s

The thing about school is that we create a learning environment where if you have a question, you raise your hand and someone gives you the answer.

So, what do our students do when they finish school and have to figure out the answers to open-ended problems where no one knows what the best answer is?

And, that’s why we need to embed 21st Century Learning Skills into our classroom programs.

So our students can take these transferrable skills and attitudes and apply them to un-googleable problems.

This unit is not designed to replace all of the hard work that you’ll have to do in your class and school about discovering how to incorporate 21st Century Global Competencies into the DNA of your programs.

Instead, it’s a starting point for conversation. You can modify, edit, adapt all of the materials (since you get the Microsoft Powerpoint, Word, and Google Slides to change to fit your specific needs.)

Each Chapter package focuses on a different “C” and contains different lessons, slides, videos, and handouts.

Although I’ve used the same structure in each chapter (activity, video, vocabulary building), there is no overlap of content between packages.

Lessons can be purchased individually, or you can purchase the entire unit at a discount. Visit the Educircles TpT store for more information.

Exploring the 6 Cs of Education is a great way to kick off the new school year or school term.

UNIT BIG IDEA

By the end of this unit, students will be able to

• Understand / Explain the 6 Cs of Education and Deep Learning (Learning Skills):
  • Character,
  • Citizenship,
  • Collaboration,
  • Communication,
  • Creativity, and
  • Critical Thinking.
• Analyze the similarities and differences between the 6 Cs of Education.
• Analyze how the 6 Cs are interconnected but separate at the same time. (Compare and contrast.)

CURRICULUM LINKS

The six Cs are a great way to connect to character education and learning skills.

Depending on where you teach, you may be able to connect it to the English Language Arts curriculum as well. Some possible connections to the Grade 8 Language Arts Ontario Curriculum are made below to give you ideas:

• Oral Communication (from the activities / think / pair / share conversations)
  • Active Listening Strategies (ONT LA 1.2): demonstrate an understanding of appropriate listening behaviour by adapting active listening strategies to suit a wide variety of situations, including work in groups (e.g. follow the conversation and make relevant contributions in a group discussion…)
• Media Literacy (from discussing videos about the 6 Cs)
  • Making Inferences / Interpreting Messages (ONT LA 1.2) Interpret increasingly complex or difficult media texts, using overt and implied messages as evidence for their interpretations.
• Writing (from vocabulary builder graphic organizer used to play with word meanings)
  • Vocabulary (ONT LA 3.3): Confirm spellings and word meanings or word choice using a variety of resources appropriate for the purpose.

MATERIALS

• PowerPoint slideshow
  (Make sure required fonts are installed or it may look weird. See Read Me note for help.)

LESSON PLAN – UNIT OVERVIEW

Today’s lesson is just an overview of what we’re going to be doing for the next few weeks. I’m going to give you a road map so you know where we’re headed. (Sometimes, if students know what they’re going to be learning, it helps them to put things together.)

Each of the “C”s is in one of these hexagon icons. (Get it? 6 Cs… six sides… hexagon…)

• Character (RED)
• Citizenship (ORANGE)
• Collaboration (YELLOW)
• Communication (GREEN)
• Creativity (BLUE)
• Critical Thinking (PURPLE)

In this unit, I’ve colour coded the hexagons. Pssst. Think rainbow.

• Actually, the rainbow metaphor is kind of cool because white light is composed of different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
• And, just like white light, if you combine all 6 Cs, all of these learning skills, you’ll find that you can see better and do better.
• It’s easier to do things if you’re not running around in the dark.

You’ll notice there’s a lot of overlap between the 6 Cs and activities in this introduction. That’s because they’re all interconnected.

• It doesn’t really matter which “C” we start with but just for fun, we’re going to go alphabetically and spend some time looking at each “C”.
• You might find that when we do an activity, it reminds you of a different “C” than the one we’re focusing on. That’s ok. You can do one activity and find different “C”s that connect with it.

Teacher Tip: So, if your class has a favourite activity, feel free to use it again but with a different conversation focus.

LESSON PLAN – REVIEW QUESTIONS

Let’s recap and see if you were paying attention!

1. What are the 6 “C”s?

• Character, Citizenship, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Critical Thinking.
• Bonus question: Does the order matter? (No. Most activities can connect with multiple Cs, but we’re doing them in alphabetical order just for fun / to have structure to this unit.)

2. What is the guiding question we need to think about as we go through the mini lessons on the 6 “C”s?

• Similarities and differences between the 6 C’s.

3. What are the three parts of each mini lesson?

• Activity to experience the C.
• Watch a video to learn about the C in a different way
• Play with the word using a graphic organizer to get a better understanding of the C.

4. Why do three different things?

• Different people learn in different ways. So, the first way is active / kinesthetic, the second way is visual, and the third way is logical / verbal.

5. What is the review question that we’ll use to reflect back on the unit?

• How are the 6 Cs interconnected, but separate at the same time?

DOWNLOAD THIS RESOURCE: (FREE) Exploring the 6 Cs Unit Overview Lesson

Exploring the 6 Cs – Lesson 1 Fun Activities and Icebreakers Intro

This lesson is a great way to introduce the 6 Cs of Education learning skills to your students and to set the tone for a year of growth mindset and perseverence:

The 6 Cs are a bunch of transferable skills that you can use at school, at home, at a job… pretty much anywhere. They’re learning skills that some people think our students are going to need in order to be successful in the 21st century.

This lesson includes 6 fun icebreakers to play with your class during the first weeks of school. 

In this package, you get over a week’s worth of lessons to do (6 periods of material). Each ice breaker is intended to fill one period of instruction. Each icebreaker lesson includes:

• an explanation for teachers of how the icebreaker connects to one of the 6 C’s.
• a description of the activity for students,
• discussion questions and teacher talking points to guide conversation

Here are the six icebreakers we carefully selected to line up with the 6 Cs of Education.

• Character (Human Knot)
• Citizenship (Switch Spots if you…)
• Collaboration (Human Shapes)
• Communication (Line Up)
• Creativity  (Boggle Brainstorm)
• Critical Thinking (Build a Tower)

There are lots of ways you could use these 6 Cs Introduction Icebreakers with your students:

1. Homeroom teachers could do one of these activities at the end of every day during the first week of September.
2. Literacy teachers could do these activities at the start of the term and collect some diagnostic information about their students abilities in oral communication and group work.
3. Your school could organize a fun Welcome Back to School event.
   • At a morning assembly, after the Principal welcomes back the students, do the Six C unit overview presentation to introduce the 6 Cs to the student body. (The Unit Overview lesson is provided for free here: https://educircles.org/resources/exploring-the-six-cs-unit-overview-lesson/
   • Students could then visit 6 workshop stations throughout the day.
   • Each workshop would focus on one of the 6 Cs and could use the icebreakers from this package.
   • The teacher running the workshop would use the lesson plan to teach the “C” to different groups of students throughout the day. (Using the lesson plan from this package means teachers don’t have to prepare anything new for the first day event. All of the materials will be provided to them. That way, they can focus on preparing their material for their own classes.)
   • During the rest of the week, literacy teachers or homeroom teachers could do deeper conversations of the 6 Cs with their classes. (But, a consistent and systematic initial overview of the 6 Cs would be provided to all students on the first day.)

When you download the zipped file, it includes:

• A Microsoft Powerpoint (PPT) file (that you can modify)
• A link to the Google Slideshow file (that you can copy and modify)
• A 23 page lesson plan (PDF)

NOTE: This lesson is part of a larger unit.

• The Unit Overview is free and part of Lesson 1 (Character Ice Breaker) is free so you can see the quality of our work.
• The other lessons can be purchased individually, or you can purchase the entire unit at a discount.

Here’s the entire Exploring the 6 C’s Unit

• Unit Overview (FREE)
• Lesson 1. Intro Ice Breakers (THIS LESSON)
• Lesson 2. Character
• Lesson 3. Citizenship
• Lesson 4. Collaboration
• Lesson 5. Communication
• Lesson 6. Creativity
• Lesson 7. Critical Thinking
• Lesson 8. Review / Assessment / Compare and Contrast the 6 Cs

WANT a FREE PREVIEW of this lesson plan before you buy it?

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Exploring the 6 C’s – Lesson 1. Intro Ice Breakers – FREE LESSON PLAN version

Let’s get excited about the 6 C’s.

• This introduction is supposed to be a taste of the different sections.
• The point of this lesson is to do some fun activities that are connected to each “C”, but without spending a lot of time explicitly going into deeper conversations and definitions. (We’ll do that later in the next 6 lessons on each individual C.)

LESSON GOAL

1. Bring everyone together in ice-breaker style activities – co-operative group / team activities.
2. Recognize that the 6 C’s are interconnected, yet separate – there’s a fine line between all of them.

TEACHER TIP: You’ll notice throughout the activities there are lots of photo opportunities for those of you who send home parent emails.

CONNECTING TO THE UNIT BIG PICTURE:

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to start to

• Understand / Explain the 6 C’s of Education and Deep Learning (Learning Skills):
  • Character,
  • Citizenship,
  • Collaboration,
  • Communication,
  • Creativity, and
  • Critical Thinking.
• Analyze the similarities and differences between the 6 C’s.

(Possible) CURRICULUM LINKS in this lesson

The 6 C’s are a great way to connect to character education and learning skills. Depending on where you teach, you may be able to connect it to the English / Language Arts curriculum as well. Some possible connections to the Grade 8 Language Arts Ontario Curriculum are made below to give you ideas:

• Oral Communication (from the activities / think / pair / share conversations)
  • Active Listening Strategies (ONT LA 1.2): demonstrate an understanding of appropriate listening behaviour by adapting active listening strategies to suit a wide variety of situations, including work in groups

MATERIALS

• PowerPoint slideshow or Google Slides Presentation
  (Download from zipped file. See Read Me note for help.)
• Ice Breaker Activity #5 Creativity – Boggle Brainstorm
  • Students need to write in their groups. (Class divided into groups of 2-3 students)
    • Option 1. Student provides their own paper and pencil
    • Option 2. Teacher provides 1 flipchart and 1 marker (per group)
• Ice Breaker Activity #6 Critical Thinking – Tallest Free Standing Tower
  • Newspapers (or flipchart paper, or other large paper you have at your school)
  • Masking Tape

Introduction

Minds On!

As we explore each “C” of Education today, the big question is can you figure out

• What they have in common?
• How are they different from each other?

The point of this lesson is to get a sense of these transferable skills.

• Remember, these are “21st century skills” – they can help us learn in the classroom, work with other people, and overcome challenges in life.
• They’re called “transferable” skills because you can “transfer” these skills from the classroom, to your job, to your personal life, etc.

MINDS ON:
Before we do some activities, lets start to think about these hexagons.  If you could move these hexagons around and group them together…

• Which of these 6 C’s do you think go together? (i.e. at first glance, they look like they mean the same thing, or they have a lot of similarities.) Why would you group them together?
• Which of these 6 C’s do you think are opposites or completely different?

At this point, there’s no right or wrong answer. The goal is to get students to start to think about connections between the 6 C’s, instead of only thinking about them in isolation…
Sample teacher prompts:

• What do you think “collaboration” is? What does it have in common with “communication”? What do you think is the difference between “Collaboration” and “Communication”?
• What do you think “Character” is? What do you think “Citizenship” is? What do they have in common? What do you think is different between them?
• What about “Creativity”? What do you think “Critical Thinking” is? What could “creativity” and “critical thinking” have in common? How could they be different?

TEACHER TIP: You could do this as a “think, pair, share” activity.

• Ask the question and give students 30 seconds to silently and independently think about the answer.
• Next, turn to their elbow-partner or get into groups of 2-3 and share answers.
• Finally, facilitate a whole-class conversation where students raise their hands and share what their little group was discussing.   

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – 1. Character

ACTIVITY: Human knot

BASIC IDEA:

• Students stand in a circle and hold hands with two different people on the other side. Their group then has to untie the “human knot” without letting go.

Why did we choose this activity for “Character”?

• Human Knot is a great icebreaker because it gets students moving and interacting with their fellow classmates.
• There is a little element of competition because the class is divided into two groups trying to unravel the human knot.
• Inevitably, the groups don’t want to “fail” (and not unravel the knot.) Also, most groups want to be “first” to win.

However, this is more than an ice-breaker. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate perseverance and character.

• After the teacher gives out general instructions and the groups start to try to untangle, it’s important for the teacher not to suggest solutions or be the enforcer of rules. (Of course, common sense dictates and teachers know their students best and will act to ensure students are safe. Depending on the grade, more or less support might be required.)
• The real question is what do people do when we’re faced with adversity and frustration because we can’t untangle the knot…
  • Do we encourage? Do we problem solve? Do we find ways to put it in perspective and stay positive?
  • Do we blame others? Do we cheat? Do we give up?
  • What does success mean?

Get into 2-3 even groups.

• Generally speaking, this works best by splitting the class into 2 groups, because if you lose, it’s okay because so did half the class. (If you have a lot of smaller groups, one of the groups might feel bad for losing.)
• Having said that, in a class of 36 students, a human knot of 18 people might be physically impossible. Then again, maybe not.   

Each student hold hands with someone who isn’t beside them.  

• This is important, because otherwise, it’s easier to solve the knot if you’re holding your elbow-partner’s hand.
• Students need to make sure they’re connected to different people, otherwise they might splinter off into multiple tiny knots. (This may happen anyway if 3 friends end up holding each other’s hands.)

How quickly can you untangle the knot without letting go?
TEACHER TIP: A stopwatch can create some fun competition.
SAFETY FIRST

• Your students may need reminders about going slowly and respecting classmates to make sure people don’t get pulled or hurt by accident.  
• Depending on the age of the group, you might need a rule that it’s okay to let go and reconnect with the same hand so that people don’t get hurt. Having said that, we’ve seen some spectacular problem solving when we’ve told older students not to let go and reposition their hand, but instead to move slowly.

CULTURAL SENSITIVITY AND PERSONAL SPACE

• You know your students best in terms of how this activity might need to be modified or constructed to ensure everyone has a positive and inclusive experience.  

TALKING POINTS: Character

Groups may not be able to untie, and that’s okay. The important conversation is about what strategies did they try? What worked or didn’t work? What could they try to do differently next time?

• What is cheating? Does it count as a win, if you cheat? Is there ever a time to cheat?
• Part of character is the ability to show persistence in the face of difficulty. What do you do when things get tough?
• But part of character is also having the empathy to understand yourself, and others. Is it important to untie the knot – even if it means someone is not having fun, or is getting pulled along
• How do we find and develop strategies to meet our goals?   

After this discussion, if time permits, try again.

• Groups can stay the same, to try different strategies to see if they can beat their previous time.
• or groups can be switched up to try different interactions and strategies.
• Or try an entire class human knot and see what happens.

(OPTIONAL) DEBRIEF  Similarities & Differences. (Two minute quick conversation)

Depending on your class and amount of time you have in class, some teachers will choose to skip the debrief to keep things moving and fast paced. Other teachers might take the time to debrief the activity and reconnect with the big question about similarities and differences between the 6 C’s.  

• Based on this activity, what do you now think “Character” means?

Now that we’ve done this activity, has your answer changed to the following questions:

• Which “C” do you think “Character” is going to be most similar to? Why?
• Which “C” do you think “Character” is going to be very different from? Why?  

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – 2. Citizenship

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – 3. Collaboration

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – 4. Communication

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – 5. Creativity

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – 6. Critical Thinking

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITY – Debrief / Discussion

Here’s what you get in a pretty zipped file:

How do you explore 21st Century Competencies in your classroom?