Building the 4Cs During Remote Learning

The rising infection rates in the current pandemic is forcing many school districts across the nation to start with a remote learning model in Fall. For teachers who had primarily taught in person earlier, structuring their learning to fit the new model can seem like an intimidating task. 

Beyond the challenges of understanding how to use technology tools effectively for instruction, there is an additional risk. 21st century skills like creativity, critical thinking or collaboration, might not get enough attention which will impact students’ overall development. These skills aren’t built in isolation. Instead, students develop these skills while interacting with their peers and teachers. 

So, how do we ensure that students continue to build these crucial skills when learning occurs in a remote fashion?

Community of Inquiry

Effective remote learning requires the development of healthy communities as outlined in the community of inquiry framework. Three essential elements – teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence – interact dynamically in the learning process.

Cognitive presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct meaning through reflection or dialog. Social presence is the ability of participants to bring their unique personalities to the community so others view them as “real people.” Social presence directly impacts social emotional learning (SEL) and indirectly supports cognitive presence when learners discuss ideas with each other. Teacher presence has two important roles – to design the content and activities for learners, and to facilitate the social and cognitive presence to achieve learning goals. 

The framework also applies to 21st century skills and the figure below shows how the 4Cs map to the framework. 

Communication and Collaboration

The first step in designing an effective remote learning experience is to set the right climate by focusing on healthy communication and collaboration. A good climate powers the social and cognitive presence and improves learning outcomes. Here are some tips to improve communication and collaboration among students: 

  • In a remote setting, students don’t get an opportunity to get to know their peers in an organic fashion. This is especially true for students new to the class or school. Consider incorporating opportunities where students share about themselves – their hobbies, likes/dislikes etc. You can also create time for students to simply chat with each other for a few minutes at the beginning or end of your remote session. 
  • Have students come up with rules of engagement for group discussions. These rules can include ensuring everyone takes turns, assigning roles, and critiquing ideas respectfully. Assigning one person to monitor the discussion and explicitly call on people who haven’t had a chance to speak is another way to ensure all voices are included. 
  • Collaboration can also be enhanced by using technology effectively. We found high engagement when students were collaboratively editing a document while being able to talk to each other through video conferencing. Students who were shy in group conversations were able to offer more ideas by simply editing the document, and more ideas got incorporated as a result. 

Creative and Critical Thinking

Creativity and critical thinking can be weaved into both discourse and content. Here are some tips to incorporate these skills into learning:

  • Open-ended projects, that are both minds-on and hands-on, provide an opportunity for students to build creative and critical thinking. A well designed project includes opportunities for students to explore ideas, exercise different cognitive thinking patterns like associative or analogical thinking, self-evaluate ideas and solutions, and iterate if necessary. Projects that use simple materials can easily be implemented in a remote setting. 
  • When students reflect on the topic before having group discussions, the outcome is better. For brainstorming ideas, the quality and originality of ideas is higher when students first think of ideas on their own before bringing them to the group. The creativity of ideas is further enhanced when students try to build on each other’s ideas (using improv’s “Yes, and” approach). Similarly, when students first research a discussion topic on their own, they are able to bring more facts into the group discussion and improve critical thinking outcomes. 

In-person instruction is effective as the core element of social presence occurs naturally. However, intentionally incorporating social aspects that build a healthy community and promote meaningful dialog can make remote learning equally powerful. 


The original and longer version of this article was first published on edCircuit

What should learning look like when schools reopen?

Over the last few months schools and teachers have had to drastically change teaching and adapt in real time to school closures. As summer approaches and schools start planning for the next year, they are yet again faced with the possibility of full or partial closures. However, the pandemic is also giving us an opportunity to try different models of learning that can be beneficial even in the long-term. 

Covid-related school closures have created a situation where in-person interaction has become a precious resource. Maintaining adequate physical distance, temperature screenings, and frequent deep cleanings are all adding a significant expense to normal day-to-day interactions that we had come to take for granted. We now need to treat classroom time as a precious resource―by conserving it and using it mindfully where it’s most effective. For example, a teacher giving a lecture to a classful of students is not a good use of classroom time as students could do that just as well remotely. 

The most effective way to structure learning would be to prioritize classroom time for building skills that require interaction and can’t be developed in isolation, while leaving individual work for offline.

Skills that need active interaction time with peers and teachers primarily fall under the 21st century skills umbrella – skills like creativity, critical thinking or collaboration. So it makes sense to “flip” learning along the boundary of 21st century skills and academic content. Here are some activities that would benefit most from in-person time, where the teacher plays the role of a coach or facilitator in helping students develop critical skills. 

Creativity and Collaboration

A key thinking pattern that underlies creativity is associative thinking―the ability to combine different ideas into something meaningful. When students discuss and build on each other’s ideas toward a common solution, they are exercising their associative thinking. The same skills also build healthy collaboration – instead of students trying to compete with each other to make their idea “win”, they try to include everyone’s ideas as best as they can. Teachers can help build these skills by observing how students interact with their group members, and guiding them to include all voices and focus on joint problem solving. 

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is when an individual improves the quality of their thinking by applying intellectual standards. It includes underlying skills like reasoning, evaluating, analyzing, judging, inferencing and reflecting. 

Socratic questioning and classroom discussions are a good way to discuss open-ended issues and build critical thinking. Critical thinking can be done both online or face-to-face, but there are differences. In online discussions students tend to use more evidence based reasoning as they can research before making their argument, while in face-to-face mode students listen to other ideas more and expand on them due to the spontaneous nature of the discussion. A blended model that capitalizes on the advantages of both models, can be a useful way to build critical thinking.  

Project Based Learning

Project based learning provides an avenue for students to be engaged in active, real-world problem solving. For students to gain most from PBL, they have to encounter and struggle with key concepts and skills behind the project. They build their thinking and knowledge in an experiential manner as they actively problem solve, by themselves or within a group.

The pandemic is causing significant disruption to the learning process and will require restructuring of lesson plans to address additional closures. Prioritizing 21st century skills for in-person classroom time can help stimulate students to think, engage in discussions, stay connected with their peers and learn from them. 

The full version of this article appeared on edCircuit

3 indoor activities to build creativity

With current school closures and approaching summer holidays, most parents are worried about the impact of extended breaks on learning for their children. While most of us associate academic work with learning, there are many different ways for children to learn and build crucial skills during these times. Students learn as much, if not more, from play and social interactions than with pure academic work. 

Here are three different ways to stretch your child’s thinking and build cognitive skills like creativity and critical thinking, in a much more stress free way.

Reframe challenges as opportunities

One powerful way to build an innovation mindset is to reframe problems as opportunities that are just waiting for a creative solution. The easiest way to find problems is with day to day activities and chores that children engage in. 

Ask your child what activities and chores they find inconvenient and how can they improve that experience. When posed as a challenge, children can come up with clever ideas. One of our students, who found cleaning his pets’ cages gross, came up with a clever idea of a new kind of trash bag with drawstrings all around that can be used to line the cage. When you need to clean the cage, you just have to pull the drawstring and all the mess gets caught in the bag.  Another student came up with the idea of a remote controlled mechanism to take out regular trash so you don’t have to carry a stinky bag for a long time. 

While not all ideas will be immediately helpful, it helps children to start thinking of problems as opportunities that they can find clever solutions to.   

Join the imaginary play

Young children can spend, what often feels like, an inordinate amount of time in imaginary pretend play. However, pretend play is also a child’s cognitive playground – where they can freely practice how to think and problem solve in different situations – and in the process build a deeper understanding of the world around them. 

In more elaborate forms, pretend play can grow into fantasy worlds or paracosms, where a child constructs an entire imaginary world with its own rules and systems. Michele Root-Bernstein, Professor and creativity scholar, found that engaging in building fantasy worlds as a child was indicative of creative accomplishments in adulthood. Highly renowned people across different disciplines like the Bronte siblings, Nietszche and Mozart invented imaginary worlds, as did a large number of MacArthur genius award recipients. She believes that the creativity involved in building fantasy worlds, equips children with skills like imagining, empathizing, modeling, problem solving and rule-breaking that are essential for any creative work. 

Pretend play and paracosms also provide an opportunity for parents and other family members to help stretch their child’s thinking. You can join your child in their fantasy world and co-create situations that need to be addressed or problems that need to be solved. In doing so, you give them a safe space to experiment with ideas while building a deeper understanding of society. 

Add counterfactual thinking to reading time

The benefits of reading books with your child, from cognitive to social emotional are well known. In a study designed to understand the effect of reading in toddlers, children were assigned to an intervention group or a control group. The intervention group received age appropriate books and additional reading time compared to the control group. The results of the study showed that families in the intervention group that did shared reading with their toddler groups, and not just reading aloud, showed significantly larger vocabulary scores compared to the control group. 

Parents can give an additional boost to shared book reading times by adding counterfactual thinking, which builds both creative and critical thinking. Save some time after reading a book together to discuss the book and pose additional questions. You can create different counterfactual questions by modifying or adding an event in the story or by changing characters and settings. For example, what would have happened if Dumbledore never gave Harry Potter the cloak of invisibility, or what would the story of Snow White look like in modern times? Sharing your ideas to the same prompts after your child shares theirs can help improve their ability to think in more diverse ways.  

The original version of this article appeared on edCircuit

We’ve partnered with Belouga to grow creativity globally!

Our popular How To Be An Inventor course has been selected to join Belouga’s collection of educational resources and is now available to educators and students around the world through this global learning platform. Belouga provides students and teachers with meaningful learning experiences, sourced from the most reputable learning organizations across the world. Belouga’s mission to build community and foster curiosity makes them a perfect partner to build an innovative mindset in students all over the world.  

Technological advances like AI are making routine jobs redundant and radically changing the nature of our workforce. Jobs that require creative problem solving are growing, while predictable jobs decline sharply. It’s not surprising that LinkedIn’s data shows that creativity is the top most skill employers look for. Now more than ever our educational system needs to adapt in ways that foster creativity instead of stifling it. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, noted psychologist and expert on creativity, puts it succinctly, “In the Renaissance creativity might have been a luxury for the few, but by now it is a necessity for all.

Our approach, reflected in our How To Be An Inventor course, is to build underlying thought patterns, like associative or reverse thinking, that lead to creative ideas. The course takes a hands-on, minds-on approach to learning and engages students to think both creatively and critically. Over the last few years, we have run different versions of the course and have had several of our students win national level awards for their ideas! Needless to say, we are excited that students and educators all over the world can now access the course through Belouga and build critical 21st century skills.  

The course is available on Belouga as a five-part series to fit within the platform’s collaborative online learning environment. It provides more than two and a half hours of content to increase creativity and innovation for students globally. 

About Belouga

Belouga was founded in 2017 with the mission of making education impactful and accessible on a global scale through peer-to-peer and classroom connection, communication, and collaboration. Realizing the rapidly changing landscape of technology and education, the Belouga team looked to create a central location, which takes the heavy lifting out of global education, and provides teachers and students with a personalized learning experience through community and content without sacrificing creativity or curriculum needs. Learn more at https://belouga.org/ 

See the full press release here

Inventor Spotlight: Ayana Bharadwaj

Our featured student inventor is Ayana Bharadwaj, who came up with an interesting concept to make educational games more accessible. Her idea won a national level award as part of the “Student Ideas for a Better America” competition organized by the National Museum of Education

Here is Ayana talking about her idea in more detail.  

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

My name is Ayana and I am in 10th grade. I enjoy playing the piano and doing Taekwondo. In school, I enjoy the STEM field. I want to become a computer scientist. 

What is your invention and how does it work?

My invention is a website that hosts educational board games that are easy to download, print and play for anyone. My goal was to make board games accessible for anyone in the world, so they can not only have fun but also learn in the process. These games have been designed by me and other students – it’s been fun for us to design the games and we hope that it’s fun for other children who play these games. 

What inspired you to develop this invention?

I noticed that many board games we had at home were also educational in some way. That made me realize that learning for a lot of us comes not only from schools but also from other games and activities that we participate in. However, for many people in this world education is a luxury, and many parents can’t afford to send their kids to school let alone get them games to help their education. By making these games free and printable, my hope is that kids with very few resources will be able to benefit. 

Did your prototype work? How was that experience? 

My prototype did work. The Google Site could be easily navigated and the games on the site were well liked among the test subjects. It was rewarding to see others appreciate the effort after working hard on developing not only the site but the individual games.

What are some things you learned from your MindAntix camp that will help you in the future? 

One thing I learned was the principle of Jugaad invention, or frugality. Basically, taking something that we use in our daily lives and trying to make it in the cheapest possible way, to benefit others who may not be able to afford those. 

Who is your favorite inventor and why? 

My favorite inventors are the Wright Brothers because flight seemed something of fantasy, but they designed a functioning glider. They also exemplify the frugal mindset – they didn’t have the same kind of money and resources as others who were working on making flying machines. Yet, they used their creativity and perseverance to be the first ones to demonstrate flight. 

What kind of problems do you want to solve in the future?

I want to solve problems that make things more equitable for everyone. I want to continue finding interesting ways to make things more affordable for others.

How will you use your prize money? 

I haven’t decided yet but I might use some of the money to help bring these games to students who need it most.

Congratulations Ayana for winning the award! We wish you the best in your future creative endeavors.