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ACT resources

At the heart of everything we do is the principle of authentic critical thinking (ACT). This means providing students with the tools to identify and challenge – rather than confirm – their assumptions and biases about the world.

ACT underpins our resources for all three levels of school students: Primary (5 – 10 yrs), Middle (11 – 16), and Senior (17-18). Click on the links to take you to each one.

Access the ACT resources

Access our authentic critical thinking (ACT) resources below. If you have any questions about our memberships, workshops, and other support services, don’t hesitate to get in touch at support@theoryofknowledge.net.

The ACT/TOK teaching and learning pathway

Placing ACT at the heart of what we do creates a learning pathway represented by the diagram below. We begin with resources for primary learners (now being introduced), move onto the middle years resources which we update each month, and culminate in either our resources for the TOK course, or, if your students are following a different educational programme (such as A-Levels or the AP), the senior ACT resources.

All our resources are incredibly flexible, and can be plugged into any educational programme. Deliver our full-length ACT courses in timetabled lessons, run our mini-lessons in PSE classes, use our extension resources such as Investigating Issues to fill your EPQ or HPQ slots, or offer your students our ‘Knowledge Journeys’ in optional extension classes outside of the usual timetabled day – it’s entirely up to you.

Help all your students to become critical thinkers

IB Diploma students are a very privileged breed. The TOK course exposes them to a range of brilliant thinkers and ideas, provides them with an epistemological framework to make sense of the world, equips them with cognitive skills to navigate the online and real world, and gives them tangible proof – in the form of an essay and exhibition – that they have developed higher order thinking skills.

We strongly believe that such educational benefits should be made available to all learners, whether they are younger students who are not yet doing the TOK course (such as those doing the MYP or IGCSE), or older students who are doing an alternative educational programme that does not include a critical thinking component (such as A-Levels or the AP).

This new section of the site gives schools the option to help all their students become critical thinkers – or, as we prefer to term it, authentic critical thinkers. Our ACT resources form a continuum of learning, from 5 – 18 years, culminating in resources which will either support the TOK course (see this section of the site), or our senior ACT resources (here).

This will be particularly exciting for schools that offer other educational programmes alongside the IB Diploma. You can now offer all your senior students the educational advantages of TOK, and help them to become nuanced, sophisticated thinkers, who will be in high demand at universities around the world, and hit the ground running when they begin their undergraduate courses.

Join us to deploy the ACT continuum

Members have access to a huge range of ACT & TOK resources, including classroom-ready courses, TOK and ACT newsletters, TOK and ACT mini-lessons, Investigating Issues, TOK Padlets, 12 Key Concepts, and many more engaging, innovative resources!

Join in seconds via this page, and set up your whole school with a resource that will help you to become a hub of authentic critical thinking.