Notes from the Director

June, 2011

I am writing this from Malaysia where I am working with a group of faculty from Sultan Idris University, one of the big teacher training universities in Malaysia. Here I am doing a two-week program with a team of 20 university faculty who will be the TBL steering committee at this univeristy to help establish a gradúate program on critical anjd creative thinking for teachers offering a master’s degree and to revise the undergraduate program in education to make it revolve around TBL. These are big changes that will not happen overnight but we are all optimistic that, with the Dean’s suppot here, this university will become the major center for TBL in Malaysia.

To me this is a major development in the field and it mirrors a similar development at Tarapaca University in Arica Chile, the major university in northern Chile that trains teachers for that región. In January there I did a similar intensive two week program following the involvement of faculty from Tarapaca University in the 2009 and 2010 NCTT summer institutes at Tufts University. The Education Department at Trapaca University is toroughly committed to making major revisions in their education program to similarly make it revolve around TBL. Their committment is so firm that this year they are sending 20 of their faculty to the 2011 NCTT summer institute this coming July.

I celebrate these new developments in the field. We have long known that if major teacher training universities make a committment to TBL and start certifying teachers who have expertise in infusing instructioin in critical and creative thinking into content instruction, the cooperating network of schools served by – and that also serve by taking in student teachers – will increase more dramatically than NCTT could ever accomplish by its on-site programs in schools by themselves. So congratulations to these two universities for making such a firm comittment to making all instruction student-based and revolve around iunstruction in skillful thinking – the cornerstones of TBL classrooms.

At the same time I also want to celebrate the strong interest generated on this trip by schools and teachers in India – in both Delhi and Mumbai – and a renewed interest in TBL on the part of a cluster of schools in Melbourne, Australia. In fact Melbourne, and all of Australia, are in the midset of major changes in the national curriculum that stress instruction in critical and creative thinking infused into content instruction as an explicit core area for development. Along with this is a planned effort to change the testing of students to include skill-oriented testing in both critical and creative thinking – an effort that NCTT will be helping with. All of this signifies to me that the momentum for changing the structure of education worldwise to a TBL insructional base is building well beyond what I commented on in my last message composed a year and a half ago. I am delighted to continue to be in there doing my part to make all of this happen.

This message would not be complete, though, without my celebrating two major accomplishments in our efforts to bring TBL to communities world wide – two jewels in our worldwide efforts. The first is the certification of a major girl’s school in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Al Tarbia Al Islamia School, as a Model Thinking-Based Learning School. Rebecca Reagan and I, together with a number of other NCTT colleagues, have been working with the teachers and administrative staff in this school for the past three years in coordination with Manal Aboud, the extraordinary leader of the TBL effort in the school, and its principal, Ms Samira Shukri. In February of this year I awarded Al Tarbia School, with its 200 teachers, its much-deserved certifícate as a Model TBL school. Congratulations to TIS for its effort and committment. It will be a leader in spreading TBL throughout Saudi Arabia.

The second major accomplishment is the further development of the network of branch offices of NCTT established internationally. Not only is NCTT-KSA continuing in Saudi Arabia, now under the leadership of Mr. Jamal Debs, but our NCTT office in Spain is opening a new office in Madrid, under the leadership of Ms Viridiana Barban, after having an impact on over 30 schools in Spain over the past two years, and we have a new office in the USA, NCTT-South, located in Jacksonville, Florida, and under the active leadership of Ms Sheryl Dwyer, a former teacher at Hedricks School in Jacksonville, one of the first TBL schools in the USA. And we soon hope to have a new office opened in Asia. These offices are all equipped to handle the demand for TBL workshops and programs in the regions that they serve, and help to take the pressure off the central NCTT office in Newton, Mssachusetts, and its leader, Jennifer Swartz.

Finally, I wish to announce that the fieldtesting on the new NCTT diagnostic assessment instrument for asssessing the level of skill used by a person in enagaging in critical thinking is now complete and this test is available to individuals, schools, colleges and universities, and states as a relaible indicator of critical thinking skill. It can be used by instructors, schools, and colleges – indeed it has already been so used – for pre and post testing to provide a formative assessment of instructional needs in teaching critical thinking.

So – I am happy to celebrate another fine year of accomplishments for NCTT and its staff, and I look forward to many more!

Robert Swartz, Director, NCTT
Jume 1. 2011, Written from Sultan Idris Education University in Perak, Malaysia