What are the 4Cs?
And why are they important?

Communication

Collaboration

Creativity

Critical Reflection

The acronym 4Cs is shorthand for developing the capabilities of Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Reflection.

They are fundamental to deeper learning and critical for individuals and communities to respond with agility to change and challenges as they arise.

The 4C capabilities are inherent in all human beings, but we must engage with them and develop them in the context and culture around us, to ensure that we grow our ability to apply them.

The 4Cs are both individual and cultural capabilities that allow schools and other organisations to imagine, enable and enact transformative change.

The 4Cs are critical capabilities for the development of human agency and support the growth of learning dispositions and self-regulation.

How are the 4Cs used in Schools?

Understanding and applying the 4Cs (creativity, critical reflection, communication and collaboration) in classrooms and staff rooms leads to more effective learning, teaching and well-being.

They’re even more critical in times of chaos, contradiction and complexity because they are the core skills needed to adapt to emergent challenges and to innovate and transform.

Read some examples of how innovative teachers have used the 4Cs in their classrooms and learning design:

How 4CTL helps you support the use and learning of the 4Cs in your classrooms, school and school community

We believe each of the 4Cs - creativity, communication, collaboration and critical reflection - are learnable and teachable. Our 4C coherence makers are the foundation of how we develop teacher and leader 4C skills in this teaching and learning.

Our 4C coherence makers are: The Creativity Cascade, The Communication Crystal, The Collaboration Circles, and The Critical Reflection Crucible.

The power of these coherence makers are that they give a clear, visual representation of the 4C capability, and include the stages, or step, one takes in the process of using each of the 4Cs.

In our unique approach to developing the 4Cs skills and capabilities, we provide practical, experiential professional learning, designed to both implicitly and explicitly strengthen these capabilities in the teachers and leaders we work with, which in turn supports them making these capabilities a reality in classrooms and staff rooms.

We make sense of the 4Cs and other capabilities, such as leadership, teaching and learning, through the application of pedagogical schemas or coherence makers, such as our coherence makers for the 4Cs, pictured above.

Realising the 4C capabilities involves developing a collective understanding of them as concepts (shared language), the processes and environments in which they thrive (shared practices) and an embedding of these practices (shared culture).