Critical Thinking As a Strategic Priority: learning from high performing education systems.

• In Event: A sustainable university in challenging circumstances. A case from Russia.

Proposal

In 2009 I joined the project North Caucasus Educational Initiative (Open Society Institute) “Multicultural School Ethos for schools of North Caucasus Republics” where the module “Critical Thinking Skills” was included into the seminars and practical activities. The North Caucasian Initiative showed me one of the possible ways to develop the civil society even in a small secondary Caucasian school where I used to work as a teacher and a deputy school principal. Since that time the issue of developing critical thinking skills has been in the main focus of my professional development, and determined the future field of my Master degree dissertation at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. And after graduating my master degree research have laid the basis for designing at the MSSES the special in-service teachers training course which engage now more than 100 teachers and more than 500 students from 15 Moscow schools.
In my master dissertation I specified the results of comparative analysis of curriculum materials in the countries that have already achieved good results in developing critical thinking skills of secondary school students. So I have selected the top countries in PISA literacy from 2000 up to 2015 for the analysis of their experience in developing critical thinking skills. I wanted to find out how to encourage teachers to use critical thinking as a core element in designing their curriculum and how to teach them to use critical thinking framework for developing formative assessment system in their subject areas.
Until recently critical thinking skills were not mentioned among the expected learning outcomes either in the secondary curriculum of the former Soviet Union or in modern Russia. In 2010 the new National Federal Education Standards defined critical thinking skills as one of the important characteristics of the future school graduate. However most teachers did not have any idea how to develop these skills. Only a tiny cohort had had some pilot training but even they needed further guidance about how to accommodate critical thinking skills in the curriculum and how to appraise the outcomes of their development. So there is an obvious need for the development of such a strategy of critical thinking development which would combine the best experience of foreign countries and at the same time would rely on those socio-economic and ideological conditions in which the Russian education system exists.
The results of my master dissertation and this analysis were presented at CIES-2016 in Vancouver.
My next step was to use the results of my research for designing and launching the special in-service teachers training course at the MSSES. After the pilot-year I presented the main findings at CIES-2017 in Mexico. The main findings showed that most every teacher who was engaged in the pilot-year started to redesign their subject programs in order to make them more structured and fill it with logically presented requirements in developing critical thinking skills. But still there are some needs in reviewing these programs to make them more transparent and easy to understand the results to be achieved. So for us this is the task for this year as well as to expand constantly the professional community, and to give teachers an opportunity to discuss their own practices outside of their region (conferences, round tables, teacher-led training webinars, etc.).

Author

• Andrey Samoylov, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES)