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"
Outsmarting IQ: Them Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence by David
Perkins, Ph.D (P.195 The Free Press 1995)