THE C-WHEEL

Hi friends! In this post I want to talk about the importance of c-wheel, but… what is the c-wheel? Who developed it?

The “creator” of the c-wheel is Carol Read, teacher educator and writer. For this reason, possibly, she developed the c-wheel to use on teacher education courses in order to help develop awareness and understanding of ways to create optimal conditions for children´s learning.

Is very important to considerer that the c-wheel is a flexible tool, which could be applied to many different teaching and learning context, and the second part, to suggest that by adopting and approach in which we take account of the whole child.

The c-wheel is a “wheel” as the name suggests, in the centre of the wheel is the child. Around the child are eight segments:

• Context: must be natural, relevant, active and experimental for the child, also it is important use of gestures, mime, body language…
• Creative: it is more important in a child´s learning, much more of primary-age children.
• Connections: it is a very important the connection with other areas (science, geography…), to teaching-learning sequence, the connections serves to child´s previous knowledge.
• Coherence: it is crucial to ensure that the reasons for doing things are perceived as relevant and worthwhile.
• Challenge: we need to develop thinking skills as well as language skills.
• Curiosity: we need to make the process of learning interesting, relevant and enjoyable for the children.
• Care: supporting the learning using positive language.
• Community: children need to feel part of a community and also feel valued and secure.

On the other hand, around these eight segments are others factors, this factors are:

• Materials: is important to know the material to be used, for example, books, posters…
• Methodology: we have to decide how we will give class, individual or general class.
• Educational and cultural context: the context and culture are important in children´s learning and therefore must be taken into account.
• Curriculum: refers to the objectives and learning outcomes are specified.
• Evaluation: including the assessment of children´s learning.

For this reason, it is important to ask the following question: which ingredients of the c-wheel are most relevant to you?

In my opinion all of the “ingredients” are very important in the teaching-learning process.