Providing Workshops, Staff Development Programs, and Resources for Schools Worldwide

We would like to welcome you to the web site of the National Center for Teaching Thinking (NCTT), a service organization for educators with business offices located in the state of Massachusetts in the USA. NCTT is dedicated to providing programs of excellence for K - 12 schools and colleges nation-wide, and around the world, on teaching and assessing skillful thinking, especially on teaching and assessing the skills of critical and creative thinking infused into standard content instruction. NCTT offers custom-designed long-term staff development programs, special courses, workshops, and a summer institute. Each of our programs, workshops, and our summer institutes draws upon a staff distinguished in the field from the USA and abroad.

Announcing The 19th Annual International Summer Institute on
Best Practices in the Field of Teaching Thinking
Thinking-Based Learning
Skills for the 21^st Century

A unique and highly acclaimed summer program for K-12 teachers, college faculty, curriculum developers, staff-development specialists, school and college administrators. The 2010 institute offers teachers a focus on how to develop and teach lessons, units, and courses across the curriculum that infuse critical and creative thinking skills and important habits of mind into content instruction. Infusing skillful thinking into content instruction enhances deep content understanding, improves thinking, and elevates classroom and test performance There will be a special emphasis in the 2010 institute on how to develop extended curricular units that infuse an appropriate emphasis on thinking tools into the sustained study of important curricular topics. The institute also offers non-teachers a program on how adults can improve their thinking skills and mental habits.. The program for adults is based on a successful innovation that applies what we know about teaching skillful thinking in an adult context. The result – what we call “positive thinking”– improves the quality of our lives as adults in the 21st Century.

For more information please visit our Summer Institute page located at http://www.nctt.net/summerinstitute.htm

Please Note: Due to inadequate enrollment Modules 3 & 4 have been cancelled in the July 2010 NCTT Summer Institute. They have been replaced, for those interested, in a new module, Module 5, on THE ASSESSMENT OF THINKING, offered by Dr. Robert Swartz, of NCTT. The location, days, times, and price of M5 are exactly the same as M3 or M4. See the description for Module 5 at our Summer Institute page.

Notes from The Director

July 2009

I am writing this from Barcelona, Spain, where I am about to give a workshop on skillful thinking to a group of parents whose children attend Colegio Montserrtat, a school that I have worked with for close to two years on infusing critical and creative thinking into content instruction, enhanced by various habits of mind. This is what we now call Thinking–Based Learning, a rich concept that I, and four of my colleagues, developed in the book of the same name that was published in the spring of 2007. Colegio Montserrat is one of a cluster of schools in Spain, two more in Barcelona, two in Madrid, and three on the Canary Islands. They have all embraced thinking–based learning and I am delighted at the fine job they are doing implementing it. In many of the schools it has changed the character of the education that is provided across the whole curriculum and across all of the grade levels being taught (Colegio Montserrat is a pre–K – 12 school). Read more...

Robert Swartz, Director of NCTT