Fostering Critical Thinking Using Instructional Strategies in English Classes

The aim of the chapter is to provide both theoretical and practical ideas about critical thinking development within English language teaching contexts. Encouraging language learners to be critical thinkers is important in teaching English as a foreign language. However, achieving the goal remains a challenge. Using various strategies together seem to be effective when properly implemented. Therefore this chapter outlines these strategies which include communicative language tasks, using authentic meaningful texts, using critical literacy, being aware of whole-brain learning, adopting a reflective teaching, enabling students to become autonomous, using explicit instruction, teacher questioning, using active and cooperative learning strategies, using literature in English classes, using creative drama, and adopting self-assessment. Teachers can enable learners to have critical thinking skills and more efficient English lessons by combining these strategies in a new way or by designing critical thinking activities in the classroom.

Critical Thinking in Science and Technology

From as far back as the 1980s, many researchers have cited the importance of critical thinking in the citizens of modern societies. Given this importance, the merits of including critical thinking as a major objective at various levels of the education system and in different subject areas of the school curriculum have been extensively argued. This chapter focuses on science and technology curricula and rationalizes the need for changes both in the development as well as the implementation of the curriculum to facilitate the promotion of critical thinking skills in students. There is also an extensive discussion of particular instructional approaches and strategies needed to facilitate this.

Teachers in the “Process of Becoming”

This chapter focuses on exploring the role of pre-service teacher (PST) narratives in a research-based model of initial teacher education (ITE) for secondary English teachers across three semesters of a two-year graduate entry, Master of Teaching (Secondary) degree at the University of Sydney, Australia. The model is underpinned by the belief that the development of the teacher's professional identity is an antecedent and generator of their ways of knowing and teacher quality. Initially, the chapter frames the model of ITE through a discussion of the relevant research literature in the field of pre-service teacher development. It then delineates the features of the model at the University of Sydney and provides a close analysis of the sequential narratives of a pre-service English teacher over the course of the first semester of study in the ITE program. Finally, the chapter reflects on the affordances of narratives in shaping PSTs' ways of knowing and professional identity.

Planning for Critical Thinking in Language Arts Instruction

This chapter focuses on the importance of planning for critical thinking in language arts instruction based on the Caribbean classroom. It seeks to identify traits of critical thinking, outline suggestions for planning for the inclusion of critical thinking, and highlight methods for incorporating critical thinking into language arts and provide solutions and recommendations. The chapter ends with suggestions for future research directions and summarizes the importance and many benefits associated with critical thinking in language arts.

A Completely Structured Training on the Angoff Standard-Setting Method for Developing Critical-Thinking Skills of Teachers

This chapter presents a completely structured training (CST) for the Angoff standard-setting method. The CST was developed to address the challenges teachers face in making the required probability judgments about student performance. It includes a comprehensive curriculum and instruction, practice, and feedback to guide participants on task performance. Overall, the approach is useful for developing critical-thinking skills among teachers in the context of assessing and evaluating educational achievement. This chapter also describes and illustrates how to use the training to facilitate professional development for K–12 teachers through programming. Guidelines, lessons and recommendations for implementation and study of CST are also provided.

Critical Thinking

Teaching critical thinking skills to students has become a central focus the language arts classroom. It is therefore important to examine what critical thinking may look like for the language arts teacher: How do language arts teachers come to know and understand? How do language arts teachers engage in critical thinking in order to enhance their pedagogical practices? This chapter examines the ways in which teachers' involvement in developing their critical thinking skills can aid them in establishing their knowledge and understandings. The chapter explores findings from a study that involved teachers in Grades 2 and 4 in the development of a framework for reading instruction in the primary grades. These findings make a case for encouraging teachers to engage in critical thinking in professional learning communities that foster professional development and collaboration in an active and reflective process.

Critical Thinking and Mathematics Teaching and Learning

The purpose of this chapter was to investigate pre-service teachers' noticing of children's critical thinking and views towards eliciting and using students' critical thinking in mathematics teaching. A mixed method study was used to provide a range of perspectives on pre-service teachers' views towards mathematics. The results indicated that the pre-service teachers initially held beliefs that mathematics teaching and learning consist of transferring information and students absorbing and memorizing information. The pre-service teachers based their instructional responses on experiences they had as students in elementary mathematics classrooms. The pre-service teachers described what they had observed about teaching mathematics as the ideal without regard for how the teaching behaviors they observed might influence children's critical thinking about mathematics. After completing a mathematics methods course, the pre-service teachers held beliefs more consistent with a reform-oriented classroom and demonstrated growth in their ability to notice children's mathematics thinking.

Pre-Service Teachers Critical Thinking and Developing and Using Models in Science

The new science and engineering practice of developing and using models is needed to achieve the vision of three-dimensional teaching and learning and should be an important new component of teacher preparation programs. This chapter examined critical thinking and preservice teachers' preconceptions about critical thinking and the practice of developing and using models. The results of the study indicated that when preservice teachers initially described how this practice might look in the classroom, only two of the six categories outlined in A Science Framework for K-12 Science Education for this practice were described by most participants. Of those two categories described by most participants, the majority were at a novice level. These results emphasize the necessity for elementary teacher education to provide opportunities for preservice teachers to better understand the practice of developing and using models, and how critical thinking can help teachers use models.

The Role of Student Feedback in Building Reflexive Teachers

The contemporary demands of the education environment today require that teachers refine their reflective thinking skills and shift towards the deeper critical thinking skills inherent in reflexive thinking. Reflexivity is a deeper level of critical thinking that assumes a degree of metacognition and “knowing-in-action” (Schon, 1983, p. 50). Metacognition is a critical tool in helping individuals become more aware of their deeply seeded biases and tacit assumptions about the way the world works. Through a phenomenological analysis of four individual case studies, this study found that student feedback was a key catalyst for building reflexivity skills. Specifically, the study details the key ways by which feedback prompted novice teachers to metacognitively think through their knowing-in-action and ultimately improve their teaching practice. The research details important implications in three areas: 1) practice, 2) theory, and 3) future research.

Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking and Clinical Reasoning Skills in Medical Education

In recent years, there has been more emphasis on developing higher order thinking (e.g., critical thinking and clinical reasoning) processes to tackle the recent trends and challenges in medical education. Critical thinking and clinical reasoning are considered to be the cornerstones for teaching and training tomorrow's doctors. Lack of training of critical thinking and clinical reasoning in medical curricula causes medical students and physicians to use cognitive biases in problem solving which ultimately leads to diagnostic errors later in their professional practice. Moreover, there is no consensus on the most effective teaching model to teach the critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills and even the skill is not effectively tested in medical schools. This chapter will focus on concepts, contemporary theories, implications, issues and challenges, characteristics, various steps, teaching models and strategies, measuring and intervention tools, and assessment modalities of critical thinking and clinical reasoning in medical education settings.