Abstract

Critical thinking is profusely recognized as a key-skill for today's higher education students, who are simultaneously future employees/employers and forever local-global citizens. Yet, critical thinking must be deliberately, explicitly, and systematically promoted if it is expected to arise and expand. Such a promotion may be stimulated by teachers through the application of strategies that are oriented to critical thinking. Alas, recurrent evidence shows that teachers themselves need teacher professional development on how to do so, seeing that, as a rule, teacher education does not address the promotion of critical thinking open-handedly. With such in mind, the present paper presents a proposal of a teacher continuing professional development program consisting of five two-hour sessions, aimed at enabling university teachers to learn about critical thinking and how to think critically and, in turn, to learn how to teach their students for critical thinking. This program shall be implemented in 2019, with teachers at a public university located in the northern-central region of Portugal. Considerations are made about how the promotion of critical thinking in higher education may be performed via university teacher continuing professional development, bearing in mind the characteristics of this specific public and the principles of teacher professional development itself.

Highlights

  • Critical thinking (CT) is comprised of capacities, dispositions, knowledge, and criteria, which can be used in everyday life to think reasonably, find explanations, make decisions, and solve challenges (Franco, Vieira, & Saiz, 2017)

  • Given its broad relevance, which reaches college campus, work world and everyday life (Franco, Vieira, & Tenreiro-Vieira, 2018), and since there is evidence that thinking can be improved and that it is possible to develop students' CT (Halpern, 2014), one core question arises from that assertion in terms of an educational prospective analysis: How can it be done?

  • We shall focus on the promotion of CT that may be promoted by teachers at school, by university professors at the higher education level

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Summary

Introduction

Critical thinking (CT) is comprised of capacities, dispositions, knowledge, and criteria, which can be used in everyday life to think reasonably, find explanations, make decisions, and solve challenges (Franco, Vieira, & Saiz, 2017). It is considered a key-skill today – and tomorrow –, say international reports (e.g., OECD, 2015; UNESCO, 2015; World Bank, 2018). The quality of thinking is open to improvement, provided that CT instruction is made available (Halpern, 2014; Saiz, 2018) Notwithstanding, both the emergence and expansion of CT require one fundamental prerequisite: promotion that is deliberate, explicit, and systematic (Franco, Butler, & Halpern, 2015). In lieu of focusing on students, it is necessary to focus first on teachers (Janssen et al, 2019), since they will not teach for CT deliberately, explicitly, and systematically without previous teacher professional development

Critical thinking and teacher professional development
Final considerations
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