The 4 Cs

Connect, challenge, concept, change

Four responses to one text — a connection, a challenge, a concept and a change. It works best with non-fiction, and the challenge is the one children skip.

Four different kinds of thinking. Connect, challenge, concept, change — one text, four angles.

Best with non-fiction. A text with a claim in it gives them something to challenge.

Prints a blank sheet. One box per C.

Work through them on the whiteboard · printing the sheet is free

The sheet it prints

The printable 4 Cs sheet — one box for each of connect, challenge, concept and change.

What are the 4 Cs — connect, challenge, concept, change?

The 4 Cs asks four different questions of one text: what you can connect it to, what you would challenge, what one big concept sits underneath it, and what has changed in your thinking. It is a thinking routine developed by Project Zero, a research centre at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; this sheet is our own, inspired by it.

Which C do children skip?

Challenge, every time. Connecting is comfortable and children are practised at it. Disagreeing with something printed in a book feels like being wrong out loud, so they leave the box empty or write something safe. If you only teach one of the four properly, teach that one.

Why does it work best with non-fiction?

Because a text with a claim in it gives them something to argue with. A story can be enjoyed without being questioned; an article saying screen time is bad for you cannot. Newspaper reports, persuasive writing and information texts all give the Challenge box something real to bite on.

How do you run it on the whiteboard?

Take the four in order — they get harder as they go, and Change only makes sense once the first three have happened. Model Challenge yourself first, out loud, disagreeing with the text in front of the class. Give it twenty-five minutes for a full text.

How do you make it harder or easier?

To start, do Connect and Challenge only, and supply a sentence stem for each. Then add Concept. The hardest is Change, because it asks a child to describe their own thinking before and after, which is genuinely difficult and worth naming as such when they manage it.

From the classroom

Say out loud that you are allowed to disagree with a published writer, because most children do not believe it. The first time I ran this the Challenge column was empty across the whole class, and the fix was not a better explanation — it was doing it myself, badly, in front of them, and picking an argument with a paragraph everyone had just agreed with. After that they would not stop. Keep the best Challenge from each lesson on the wall; it changes what the class thinks reading is for.

Try it now

Take any news article aimed at children and do Challenge first, out of order, before anyone gets comfortable. It sets the tone for the other three.