In this video, Sarah Lytle, Executive Director of Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network, explains The 6Cs. This is an excerpt from a workshop designed for architects. It was part of a series on Playful Learning presented by AIA in Philadelphia in 2023.
Playful Learning is a powerful strategy that fuses play with learning. It’s focused on strengthening the cognitive, social and emotional skills of children between the ages of 0 and 8. When Playful Learning is designed into the architecture of public spaces, it sparks caregiver-child interactions, enabling children to joyfully build critical skills that positively impact their future. WATCH THE VIDEO!
TRANSCRIPT:
Preparing Kids for Success: The 6 Cs
The 6Cs are 21st-century skills for kids. This comes from the literature on child development in terms of thinking about what kinds of skills prepare children for success and prepare kids to thrive in the future. It also comes from the research, interviews and information from the business world in terms of what are the qualities that business leaders would like to see in their workforce and in candidates that they hire. We're taking both ends of the spectrum and thinking about how we can distill some of those qualities, some of those skills, into what we call the 6Cs:
Collaboration
Communication
Content
Critical Thinking
Creative Innovation
Confidence
On a very general level, you might imagine what collaboration is. It’s typically working with or in concert with somebody else to achieve a similar goal.
Communication involves all forms of communication—verbal and nonverbal. It’s how you express yourself and how you receive other forms of communication.
Content is our third C, and that's what you might think of as a traditional school subject—math, science, literacy. All of those pieces go into the content bucket.
Oftentimes when we think of “learning goals,” people gravitate toward the content bucket because they’re thinking, “We want to teach math. We want to teach scientific reasoning. We want to teach something about nature.” That's fine. Those things are important, but I think it's also important to note that those are only one of the six Cs.
Our next C is critical thinking. This is your ability to put pieces together to assemble an argument, determine fact from opinion. Think about how you back up your opinion—with sources or with information. All of that is critical thinking.
The next C is creative innovation. How can you do something that's never been done before? How do you put things together in a brand new way or think a little bit outside the box?
And then confidence. How do you recover if something that you've tried does not work? How do you try it again and try a different solution? How do you defend your opinions or defend your argument? All of that goes into that confidence bucket.
The 6Cs in those learning goals are a little bit more broad than what you might think of as a learning goal.
Your learning goal could be math, it could be science, but it could also be collaboration. It could also be creativity—that creative innovation. And when we design for Playful Learning, we're trying to get at least one or two of these into our designs.
Now, truth be told, you're probably going to end up with a little bit of all six of them in your final design. But when you think about designing proactively, we often find that it's easier to pick one or two and design for that, and the rest are going to come along.
Why do we think the rest come along? Well, when we think about these 6Cs, we think that they build on each other.
For example:
Once you learn how to collaborate really well, you're developing your communication skills.
Once you develop your communication skills, you're going to be able to get into that content knowledge.
Once you have some content knowledge, you can start thinking really critically about things.
Once you think really critically about things, you can start to invent new things and assemble things in new ways, in creative ways.
And then once you do that, you really build confidence over time, so it moves in a spiral kind of fashion. You can also see that there are depths of this. There's light touch collaboration and then there's really deep collaboration.
You can imagine this in tornado hurricane fashion, each of these Cs building on each other and then building in depth over time.
Now it is absolutely true that some of this is developmentally related. You're probably not ever going to expect an infant, for example, to be at Level 4 critical thinking. That's just not developmentally possible, really. But it's also true that certain environments and specifically designed environments can invite a deeper level of participation or a deeper level of each of these Cs.
What does that look like?
Think about communication, for example. Level 2 communication is Show and Tell. I’m going to say, “Juliet, can you tell me about the book you read?” She's communicating. She's communicating effectively. There is a communication element to that.
But what if, instead of just asking that back and forth question, it’s not open ended, what if instead you told a joint story together? What if you built the characters together, built the setting together?
For example:
We're going to tell a story about fairy princesses. Maybe they live in a pool and we're going to tell this new story that we've never heard before. And we're doing it together! So we're not only collaborating, which by the way was not the C that we're talking about. But we're also getting to that deeper level of communication because we're doing it together, and it's a joint process that we've engaged in.