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 12th Annual National Center for Teaching Thinking February Seminars

Every February for the past 12 years the National Center for Teaching Thinking has offered 2 weeks of special seminars on the latest work in the field of infusing the teaching and assessment of thinking skills in regular content instruction. This year the trainings will take place during the weeks of February 14 - 18th and February 21 - 25, 2011.

Week I is entitled Instructional Strategies for the Effective Infusion of Critical and Creative Thinking into Content Instruction

Week II is entitled Developing Diagnostic Assessment Instruments to Monitor Students Thinking Skills

For more information please visit our February Seminar page located at http://www.nctt.net/february_program_page.php

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