The 4C's

The 4C's is a Visible Thinking Routine used to synthesize and organize ideas. It comes from the book Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (p. 140). According to the authors, the 4C's is used to make connections, identify key concepts, raise questions, and consider implications. It is a text-based routine that helps identify key points of complex text for discussion that demands a rich text or book.

What are the 4C's?*

Connections: What connections can you draw between the text and your own life and/or other learning?

Challenge: What ideas, positions, or assumptions do you want to challenge or argue in the text?

Concepts: What key concepts or ideas do you think are important and worth holding on to from the text?

Changes: What changes in attitudes, thinking, or action are suggested by the text, either for you or others?

*Click here for a more detailed description of the this Visible Thinking Routine.

In fifth grade, a teacher was looking for a learning engagement that would allow her students to get into issues related to human and natural changes to the environment. She was noticing that there was a lot of news that connects with this topic every day.

Specifically, the teacher decided she wanted to focus on water scarcity. In her class, the students were investigating how human development affects the water supply and water quality because there are so many obvious global connections to make. After doing some quick searching, the classroom teacher quickly learned that there was a lot of content out there on water scarcity. The trick was finding the right resource that contained enough information but was still fifth grade appropriate.

After finding some sources that fit the "rich text" description that this Visible Thinking Routine demands, the teacher identified a conceptual understanding she wanted her students to develop during the learning engagement: Students will understand that the availability of water affects human interactions with the environment.

In planning the learning engagement, the teacher used the inquiry cycle developed by our staff recently during a professional development day.

The staff in our building used the Visible Thinking Routine "I used to think .... Now I think" to show their understanding of inquiry. Their responses were then synthesized together and fit under three major parts of inquiry: invitation, investigation, and demonstration.

Invitation: During the invitation stage of an inquiry, the teacher is responsible for igniting an authentic interest in the students and capturing their hearts, brains, and spirits. 

In order to do this, the teacher had the water fountain turned off after gym class so the students didn't have access to water, especially when they needed it the most. She gave the students a Dixie cup that they could use to walk upstairs to the office to get some water.

Investigation: During the investigation stage of an inquiry, students need to discover information from a variety of sources, construct knowledge and understanding by digging deep into the material, and make their thinking visible.

To investigate the topic of water scarcity, the students watched a video about Gladys and how The Water Project helped her village get access to clean, fresh water.

Students then were introduced to the 4C's activity and were given the article Food for the Hungry Establishes Clean Water Systems for 200,000 People Worldwide. Students individually read the article and were instructed to write down any connections, challenges, concepts, and changes they thought of while they read (a copy of their recording sheet can be found below).

Demonstration: During the demonstration step in the inquiry process, students are given the opportunity to reflect on their learning, while they generate additional thoughts and questions.

To demonstrate their thinking and learning, fifth graders came together and shared their connections, challenges, concepts, and changes in a discussion. Students continued to add to their recording sheets as they heard the ideas of others.

An example recording sheet of the 4C's.

The teacher continually asked students to back up their responses with evidence. As students would share their statements, assertions, or opinions, the teacher often would ask, "“what makes you say that?” or “tell me more about that", which is the Visible Thinking Routine, "What makes you say that?" also from Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison's book Making Thinking Visible (p. 165).

After reading about how 5th graders used the Visible Thinking Routine of 4C's to identify key points of complex text for discussion, how could you or have you used this Visible Thinking Routine to make your students thinking about key points in complex texts visible?

Writing conceptual statements with students

In a Primary Years Program, we must find a balance between “acquisition of essential knowledge and skills, development of conceptual understanding, demonstration of positive attitudes, and taking of responsible action,” (Making the PYP Happen, p. 10).

Learning specific factual content and skills is important, however educators must also identify the timeless, abstract, universal, and transferable concepts they want their students to learn. “The factual knowledge is what students must know in order to describe, discuss, explain, or analyze the deeper concepts. One cannot understand the conceptual level without the supporting factual knowledge. But there must be a synergy (emphasis added) between the two levels if we are to systematically develop intelligence,” (H. Lynn Erickson, p. 3, Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom, 2007, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press).

As students work within the synergy between specific knowledge and universal concepts, they should make their thinking visible by synthesizing their learning into a conceptual statement. Erickson, calls these statements generalizations: “Two or more concepts stated in a relationship that meet these criteria: generally universal application, generally timeless, abstract (to different degrees), supported by different examples (situational). Enduring, essential understandings for a discipline,” (Erickson, 2007, p. 31).

Not long ago, I was working with fifth-grade students on the concepts of decisions, choices, and impacts by studying specific decisions Nelson Mandela made in his life and the impacts they had on his life, his country, and the world. (To get a more complete idea of what I did in that lesson, see my last blog post on Flow Maps.) Once students had read about, described, discussed, explained, and analyzed Mandela’s decisions and their impacts, I wrote the words, “Decisions, Choices, Impacts” on the board and asked the students, “based on what we learned today about Nelson Mandela, his decisions, and their impacts, what can we say that we learned about decisions, choices, and impacts in general?” I told the students that the first idea didn't have to be perfect, but we just needed to put something up so we could start to work with it.

The first student volunteered the following statement:

Next, a student tried to offer a completely different statement and I encouraged her to make edits to the one we already had, instead of completely starting over. Another student suggested the following edit:

When I asked her to explain her thinking (in order to make it visible!), she said, "because you could do something bad and it will also impact your life."

Then, another student mentioned the following edit:

I asked her to explain her thinking and she said that our decisions have impacts right away and when you grow up (we had discussed short- and long-term impacts during the lesson). So, we shouldn't just say, "when you grow up." I asked her if there was anything we could add instead, to communicate that decisions have impacts in both the short- and long-term, so she proposed the following addition:

After that, a student said he wanted to make the following revision:

When I asked him to explain his thinking, he said, "We can do lots of things - like pick something up (as he mimed picking up an object) - that don't impact our lives. But we talked about what happens when we make a decision."

At this point in the lesson, students weren't volunteering any more edits or revisions to the statement, so I read it aloud to them: "If you make a decision it can have an impact on your life in the future." Then, I told them we had to "test" our statement to make sure it was conceptual:

"Does this statement apply to Nelson Mandela?"

YES! the students responded.

"Could this statement apply to us?"

YES! the students responded.

"Ok, if this statement applies to us here in Minnesota, would it apply to a student in France?" 

YES! the students responded.

"If it applies to us here in 2014, would it apply to a 10-year-old in 1914?"

YES! The student responded.

Although I knew that our statement met the criteria for a generalization as outlined by Erickson, I had one more change I wanted to make. I told the students that since our statement applied to everyone, I thought we should change the pronouns "you" and "your" to "we" and "our". They consented and we were left with our final version:

Note: ordinarily, when crafting conceptual statements, generalizations, central ideas and lines of inquiry, it is advised to avoid pronouns. However, in the moment, working with the fifth graders, I felt using pronouns in our conceptual statement was appropriate to keep our statement directly relevant to the lives of the students.

After reading about how fifth graders wrote a conceptual statement based on the synergistic learning they had done, how could you or have you written conceptual statements with your students to synthesize their learning?