4K-Modell des Lernens
The 4K model (abbreviated 4K, English Four Cs or 4Cs) formulates four competencies that are of outstanding importance for learners in the 21st century: communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.
While the model is also widely anchored in education policy in the USA, it has become better known in the German-speaking world, especially through the presentation by education researcher and OECD member Andreas Schleicher at Re:publica 2013
The 4Cs originate from the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21), a U.S. non-profit organization in which business representatives, education professionals and those involved in the legislative process have been advocating for education in a digital context since 2002. P21 has developed a "Framework for 21st Century Learning" in which the 4C named "learning and innovation skills" are assigned. They are intended to designate competencies that represent foundations for self-directed learning and adaptation. P21 assumes that these skills would be given special weight in 21st century work environments. A separate research dossier is devoted to each of the four Cs.
Visualization of P21's framework.
The coordinator of the PISA studies, Andreas Schleicher, also argues from occupational requirements that put classical subjects in the background. In his view, the 4Cs give learners the ability to gain new insights and make connections:
"Rather than just learning to read, 21st century literacy is about reading to learn and developing the capacity and motivation to identify, understand, interpret, create and communicate knowledge. Many schools in the U.S. have adopted the 4Cs as part of their mission statements because they clearly identify generic competencies and thus make it possible to formulate goals independently of subject-related learning. Schleicher emphasizes that the way knowledge is handled has changed: Content is no longer stored and then conveyed to learners by teachers. Rather, according to Schleicher, it flows in streams of incessant communication and collaboration. In this sense, the 4Cs represent a reaction to knowledge work in digital contexts. Lisa Rosa, an educational consultant from Hamburg, shares this view when she cites three reasons that made the 4K model a point of reference for didactics in the 21st century:
More and more work is being done by machines. Each new job requires more complex thinking, situated self-responsible decisions and relational skills. The social problems to be solved are so complex that they can only be dealt with by collective intelligence." Rosa embeds the 4Cs in a comprehensive modeling of learning, thus pointing out that they are not a method of learning, but prerequisites of effective learning. The 4Cs cannot be separated, but always relate to each other: no effective communication is possible without creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking, etc.
In German-speaking countries, the Zurich University of Teacher Education has been offering teacher training courses based on the 4Cs model since 2016. Hilbert Meyer has critically analyzed these [1]
Denken in Systemen[Bearbeiten | Quelltext bearbeiten]
Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge's call for schools to teach systems thinking can be seen as an extension of the 4K model, even though the authors do not make this connection. In their book "Triple Focus - A New Approach to Education", the two authors argue for focusing education in the 21st century on problems in a global context:
"The central dilemma of the Anthropocene era is to learn to understand the systemic consequences of our own actions on a global scale. This work reminds us that the real challenge is not to get smarter or cleverer at the non-systemic ways of thinking that have enabled the accelerated change of the industrial age - but to tap into and develop our deeper intelligences of self, other, and system at a time when we really need them." Individual education experts, such as education journalist Christian Füller, fundamentally question whether business organizations should intervene in such a formative way in the formulation of new teaching-learning concepts. This criticism also applies to the OECD, which strongly supports the 4K concept. In the policy field of "digitization" in particular, a large number of organizations have now been formed that are directly or indirectly influenced by industry (e.g., in Germany Initiative D21, Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur.) They exert a strong influence on educational institutions like lobbyists. The primacy of the pedagogical is being replaced by competence specifications from the digital economy. The 4K concept is seen as a vehicle for this in this context.
Lisa Rosa sees the danger that the 4Cs are being introduced within the framework of an efficiency logic that is detrimental to deeper learning:
"[W]hen Andreas Schleicher's 4Cs get to the heart of the matter [...], then it cannot mean pursuing the neoliberal idea of efficiency and adapting activities to the available learning time (having many students cram a lot of material in little time). Then it can only mean the other way around, reserving time for knowledge-building 4K learning, and more and more of