What are the 6Cs in Becoming Brilliant?

Collaboration, Communication, Content, Critical thinking, Creative innovation and Confidence. The authors present them as building on each other in that order.

Who wrote Becoming Brilliant?

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff of the University of Delaware and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University, developmental psychologists who also wrote Einstein Never Used Flash Cards.

Is Becoming Brilliant for parents or teachers?

Both. It offers ideas for home, and several chapters describe how schools can teach the 6Cs.

What age is Becoming Brilliant for?

It is written for adults, with examples that run from preschool through the early teens.

Why does collaboration come first in the 6Cs?

Hirsh-Pasek told NPR that collaboration, from getting along with others to controlling your impulses, is the foundation everything else is built on. You cannot communicate without someone to communicate with.

Becoming Brilliant – WISE Score & Parent Review | Screenwise

Becoming Brilliant

Name: Screenwise
Author: Screenwise

book2016Parenting, Education

89%

WISE Score

Two leading child psychologists replace the report card with six skills that matter more: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

Becoming Brilliant

book

2016, Parenting, Education

89%

WISE Score

Two leading child psychologists replace the report card with six skills that matter more: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creativity and confidence.

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Screenwise Verdict

Becoming Brilliant is the book for parents who suspect test scores are measuring the wrong things. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, two of the best-known researchers on how children learn, propose a different report card: the 6Cs. Collaboration comes first because everything else rests on it, then communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence.

The useful part for parents is the ladder. For each C, the authors describe four levels, so you can see that a kid who only plays alongside others is at the start of collaboration, and what the next step looks like. That turns a vague goal like "be creative" into something you can notice and nudge.

It reads like a book written by academics for parents and teachers together, and the school-reform chapters will matter more to educators. The framework is worth the effort.

In our guide to Parenting Books

The best books about raising kids with screens are mostly about raising kids.

Age Fit

A book for parents and teachers. Most useful for parents of kids from about 2 to 12, with examples from preschool through middle school. Parents of babies and toddlers should start with the same authors' Einstein Never Used Flash Cards.

WISE Breakdown

Wholesome

Puts kindness, cooperation and confidence at the core of what success means for a child, and gently pushes back on test-score pressure.

Imaginative

Champions creativity and play, and the six-part framework is a fresh way to see a child's growth, though the writing is closer to a textbook than a story.

Safe

Nothing concerning for an adult reader.

Enriching

A research-based framework with four levels for each skill and many ideas for home and school. It reads dense in places and spends real time on school reform.

Parent Info

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Why It Might Be Great

A better definition of success. Six skills that predict how kids do in school, work and life, built on learning science.
Each C comes with four levels, so parents can see where a child is and what comes next.
The order is the insight. Collaboration is the base, and confidence to take smart risks sits on top.
Full of examples of schools and programs already teaching this way.

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What to Watch For

It is denser than a typical parenting book. Read the chapter on the C your kid finds hardest first.
Several chapters are about how schools should change, which helps parents talk to teachers but gives fewer tips for the kitchen table.
A framework can turn into one more thing to grade. Use the levels to notice growth, not to rank your kid.

Conversation Starters

"What is something you figured out with a friend that you could not do alone?"
"Can you explain how your favorite game works to me?"
"What is something hard you want to try even if you might mess up?"

Deep Dive

Computers will always beat kids at remembering facts

Hirsh-Pasek likes a line about Rip Van Winkle. If he woke up today, she told NPR, there is one institution he would recognize: the school, with kids "still sitting in rows, still listening to the font of wisdom at the front of the classroom." Schools still reward recalling facts, and computers will always be better at that than people. What they will not be better at, the authors argue, is working with others, solving new problems and being part of a community. Becoming Brilliant is their proposal for measuring those things instead.

Portraits of Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, with short brown hair and a black-and-white necklace, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, with curly dark hair and a gray jacket Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (left) and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff. Photos from the Brookings Institution.

The 6Cs stack on each other

Collaboration. Getting along with others, from not kicking someone off the swing to working on a team. Everything else rests on it.
Communication. Speaking, writing, reading and listening.
Content. Knowing things, which depends on being able to understand language and read.
Critical thinking. Sorting through masses of information, which you cannot do without content.
Creative innovation. Making something new, which takes knowing something well first.
Confidence. The willingness to take smart risks and fail. "There isn't an entrepreneur or a scientific pioneer who hasn't had failures," Golinkoff said.

For each C, the authors lay out four levels. A preschooler who plays next to another child is at level one of collaboration; a kid who can disagree with a teammate and still finish the project is near the top.

Small moments are where the Cs grow

The book's practical advice is about everyday questions. When a child asks why traffic lights are red, yellow and green, a parent can shut it down, explain it, or turn it back and help the child reason it out. Nobody gets that right every time; the point is noticing how many of those moments there are.

The book Becoming Brilliant, its teal cover showing a baby in oversized glasses sitting on an open book Becoming Brilliant, published by the American Psychological Association. Image from becoming-brilliant.com.

Watch them

Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek on how play became a four-letter word in early education:

Hirsh-Pasek on rethinking how we educate children, for the Simms/Mann Institute:

Read it with

The authors' earlier book, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, covers the baby and preschool years. Mitchel Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten shows what creative innovation looks like when kids build with code.

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