CoRT Thinking …

helps educators to build a successful curriculum … and your students to build skills for the future

Background: The program teaches thinking as a basic skill that can be acquired, and the skills then used in all areas of the curriculum. CoRT stands for Cognitive Research Trust—a UK educational research organisation in Cambridge. Dr. de Bono developed the original 60 CoRT thinking tools for children in grades K-12 in the early 1970s to equip school administrators and teachers with instructional materials to teach children critical, constructive, and creative thinking skills.

Many teachers around the world have been teaching CoRT tools in their curriculum subjects with great success: math, reading, science, geography, literature, critical thinking, problem solving and debate are some examples.

“Teach your students to think … and you’ll teach them to succeed.”—Dr. Edward de Bono

Availability: The world has changed dramatically since the 1970’s and so have teacher and student material needs. We expect to have the first series ready for purchase by June 30th, 2008.

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CoRT Highlights

Extends the “gifted”, strengthens the “remedial” students.
Enables schools to infuse the teaching of thinking across age and ability levels.
Develops specific thinking skills to improve performance in all subject areas in school.
It improves the learning environment of the classroom by strengthening teacher instruction and learner comprehension.
Impacts yearly State assessment scores.
Concerned with higher order thinking, comprehension and communication skills across the curriculum.
Provides structured groups discussion tools.
Improves reading-writing sequences.
Broadens student and teacher perception.

The CoRT Program

CoRT is a 60 lesson, 2 year program that teaches students of all abilities to effectively apply their intelligence to any academic, personal, or social situation. The lessons are generic enough to be taught at any grade level from K - 12, with minor adaptations.

CoRT is broken into 6 segments of 10 lessons each. Each lesson teaches a new thinking tool. The first segment of 10 lessons is sequential. After CoRT 1 Breadth is complete, you can pick and choose the segments that best meet students’ needs, or you can teach the whole program systematically.

CoRT 1: Breadth—helps students broaden perception—as fundamental to thinking as vocabulary is to reading.

CoRT 2: Organization—gives students a variety of tools to organize their thinking.

CoRT 3: Interaction—helps students observe the thinking involved in arguments, how a point of view is presented or defended, and the value and types of evidence.

CoRT 4: Creativity—students find out how to generate fresh new solutions to challenges, to change concepts and patterns and to get great results in design thinking.

CoRT 5: Information and Feeling—tools to separate emotions from facts. Asks what information do we have? What do we need? How can we get it? What values and feelings can we apply to the information?

CoRT 6: Action—begins with the purpose and ends with specific action steps for the implementation of the outcome of thinking.

"...it is reasonable to conclude that CoRT has considerable impact on thinking about the kinds of imaginative or common sense situations highlighted in CoRT materials...there can be some impact on general measure of intelligence and on school performance...CoRT is straightforward, ingenious, and quite easy to apply. Intelligence can be taught with CoRT"