The Durham District School Board (DDSB) has recently joined The Critical Thinking Consortium as a partner.

Partners have free access to the three main online resource collections: Tools for Thought, Critical Challenges and Source Docs. In addition as a partner, teachers in DDSB will receive a discount should they wish to purchase a course pac, print resources or other on line resources. Videos for students, Take 2, such as those explaining the historical thinking concepts are free for all teachers.

Teachers can create their account within our DDSB partnership by in the following ways: 1. Go to the following address http://shop.tc2.ca/login.html 2.

Click on Create an Account

3.

Complete My Account Information

Use durham.edu.on.ca email to connect to board partnership

i.e. smith_john@durham.edu.on.ca

4.

Complete the rest of the information and press

A teacher will now be entitled to log into Teaching Critical Thinking Consortium to obtain resources to help bring inquiry and critical thinking alive and to meet the revised curriculum. Teachers are able to browse through the resources to use in their classrooms. Source Docs http://sourcedocs.tc2.ca/ Source Docs is a collection of images and documents to support inquiry in history, social studies and geography. The three collections are: History docs: Photographs, primary text, secondary materials Picture sets: drawings, photographs, paintings Background briefs: providing background information for teachers Over one hundred sets are provided (more are being worked on) that include: 10-15 carefully selected images, primary sources or secondary sources Teacher notes with suggested tasks and critical thinking tools

Tools for Thought http://tc2.ca/en/teaching-resources/online-resourcecollections/tools-for-thought.php Tutorials and lessons that introduce a range of tools/strategies/skills students need to think critically.

The Tools for Thought collection includes: Mini-lessons to integrate skill development into any subject area PDF packages with teacher instructions and student materials Some activities include interactive whiteboard activities and videos Some sample skills are: Assessing significance Inference Find another perspective Developing probing question Assessing evidence

Critical Challenges http://tc2.ca/en/teaching-resources/onlineresource-collections/critical-challenges.php The Critical Challenges collection includes online lesson plans to help students become better critical thinkers while learning content of the curriculum. These inquiry activities will complement a classrooms existing resources. Lessons have been created for K to Grade 12. Sample lessons examples are: The richest civilization Changes in the community Is Canada a good model of democracy? How globalized are our lives? Immigration: The changing face of Canada

The Critical Thinking Consortium does have selected documents in French and is continually working to add more to site for teachers to use.