Promoting critical thinking in higher education in the context of teacher professional development

Abstract

[EN] 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.