Our resources for 11-15 year-old learners include the Thinking Citizen, the Thinking for Yourself lessons, the World We Live In course, and our support for IGCSE Global Perspectives.
Embedding key ideas at this stage helps students become more curious, engaged, and intellectually confident, laying the foundations for a lifetime of nuanced and open-minded thinking.
Access the middle school ACT resources
Click on the buttons below to explore our middle years ACT resources, designed to help 11-15 year-old students develop the habits of authentic critical thinking.
As well as being valuable in their own right, these resources lay the foundations for the kind of thinking students will need in TOK and other sixth form courses.
Key thinkers who have inspired ACT
Our approach to critical thinking has been informed by many key thinkers, among them John Stuart Mill, Julia Galef, Alex Edmans, and Sir Ken Robinson. Each has shaped the way we think about what authentic critical thinking means, and what it looks like in practice.
John Stuart Mill’s observation that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” is the founding principle of ACT. Julia Galef’s distinction between scout and soldier mentalities develops this further, and her insight that scouts are people whose self-worth is not tied to being right is, for us, one of the most important ideas in education.
Alex Edmans (see video) reminds us that critical thinking is not an elite skill reserved for specialists. “We often have the discerning skills already within ourselves,” he argues. “We just need to overcome our biases and deploy them.” Sir Ken Robinson’s insistence that education must be personalised rather than standardised underpins our entire approach to ACT as a framework for developing genuinely independent minds.
All of these thinkers feature directly in our full-length courses and mini-lessons. We believe that if an idea is not engaging enough to share with students, it should not be driving our pedagogy.
ACT & TOK pathways
Placing ACT at the heart of what we do creates a learning pathway moving from our middle years resources through to either the TOK course, our senior ACT resources, or our dedicated materials for students following A-Levels, the AP, or other non-IB programmes.
Our resources can be plugged into any timetable – as full-length courses, (including our new dedicated course for American Diploma students), short mini-lessons in PSE classes, kickstarters for EPQ or HPQ slots, or critical media studies in optional enrichment sessions.
Help yourself to these samples – then join us!
Download an huge range of free sample materials, showing our innovative, compelling, and provocative approach to teaching and learning. If you like what we do, join us here. In the meantime, subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, The Examined Life, which will help you to make sense of a challenging world!