Factors that shape English teachers’ beliefs about critical thinking in Kazakhstan.

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Exploring teacher agency, beliefs, identity, practices and quality

Proposal

Recently, Kazakhstan has been implementing essential reformation of the education system, which touched upon different aspects of schooling. The agenda of the internationalization of higher education stipulated significant changes in secondary school: the changes in the national curriculum caused the shift in teaching paradigms, and has led to the imperatives to reconsider teachers’ practices (Bridges, 2014). As a result, the Kazakhstani policymakers revised educators’ role and paid attention to the international agencies’ recommendations to focus on teaching particular skills of the 21st century (Asian Development Bank, 2012; 2013; World Economic Forum, 2016). Thus, critical thinking became a buzz word meaning an essential skill necessary for students’ success in life, in general, and their employability, in particular (MoES, 2010; Felix, 2016). In addition, a big emphasis has been put on trilingual policy in school education (Irsaliyev et al., 2017) aiming at increasing the human capital capacity and joining the global economic arena.
However, Burkhalter (2013) and Burkhalter and Shegebayev (2012) suggest that the Soviet background or the legacy left by the communist education hamper the Kazakhstani teachers’ adequate shifting to student-centred teaching in general, and using critical thinking in their classroom, in particular. In contrast, other researchers find that the tradition of fostering students’ thinking skills was familiar to the Soviet pedagogy (Fimyar, 2015; Fimyar & Kurakbayev 2015).
Exploring the experience of educational reforms of the post-Soviet republics that implemented many processes of curriculum innovation and successfully integrated in the European space, the researchers imply that there is a gap between the policies and teachers’ responses to them (Dundua, 2003; Kesküla, Loogma, Kolka, & Sau-Ek, 2012; Rubene, 2009). As many works evidence, teachers’ classroom practices are interdependent with their professional development and beliefs (Borg, 2011; Sahlberg & Boce, 2010; Timperley, 2011). Thus, if we want to change the ways of present teaching, it is important to explore what beliefs teachers hold about current educational reforms (Fives & Buehl, 2012)and to find out if they are ready and competent to implement the top-down initiatives.
The purpose of this paper is to explore what factors influence EFL teachers’ beliefs about critical thinking in the secondary education in Kazakhstan. To achieve this, the paper will answer the following questions:
1. What are the EFL teachers’ beliefs about the focus on critical thinking in the national curriculum?
2. What beliefs about critical thinking do teachers hold in relation to their classroom practices?
3. What factors influence teachers’ beliefs about critical thinking?
The study was carried out in North Kazakhstan, in schools with the Russian language of instruction. This research can provide valuable information for the design of effective teacher education and professional development programs in Kazakhstan, on the post-Soviet space, and elsewhere.
To answer the research questions, a mixed methods research was conducted. Convenience sampling procedures were used to recruit secondary school teachers of English as the participants for this study. In total, 217 teachers completed a questionnaire, among them eight English teachers were interviewed on a face-to-face basis and 16 teachers took part in 3 focus group discussions. At the follow-up stage, two more experts of teachers’ professional development were individually interviewed for an outside perspective. Parallel mixed data analysis (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009) was applied to process the collected data.
Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics: principal component analysis and multivariate analysis of variance were utilized to examine statistical differences on teachers’ beliefs by years of experience, education and special training, and location of the school (urban/rural).
The thematic analysis of semantic themes was applied to the qualitative data inductively, i.e. themes emerged from the data “without trying to fit it into a pre-existing coding frame” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 83). In the context of this paper, such themes as teachers’ schooling experience, their professional development, their beliefs regarding the curriculum, its purpose and efficiency, and general issues of teaching English at school were identified and analyzed.
The quantitative and qualitative data complemented each other in the discussion to report on the important findings: what teachers with different background emphasize when defining critical thinking, what they found beneficial and challenging in critical thinking implementation, and what factors influenced their beliefs and practices.
Overall, the Kazakhstani teachers of English hold diverse beliefs about critical thinking, its nature and purposes. Some educators are rather selective about critical thinking as a method of teaching a foreign language, and understand it as a system of particular tools, as it has been presented in previous research (Burkhalter & Shegebayev, 2012; Ward, Beach, & Mirseitova, 2004). That is, teachers define critical thinking as a pedagogical approach in EFL teaching based on the variety of techniques and exercises used to develop major language skills of listening, reading, writing, and speaking.
In addition, they tend to justify the rationale for using critical thinking in their teaching, but to a limited extent. Relating my qualitative data to Kesküla’s et al. (2012) study on teachers’ responses to the change in educational policies, the majority of interviewees accept the focus on critical thinking due to institutional requirements and at the same time the teachers have to adapt the prescribed curriculum to their own needs and knowledge, while as the most of focus groups participants admit they are not sure they are teaching for critical thinking in a proper way.
The findings concerning the influence of Soviet legacy on teachers’ beliefs contrast to what Burkhalter (2013) states, and support Fimyar & Kurakbayev (2015) who suggest that some forms of critical thinking were developed and widely applied during the Soviet period but under a different name of the pedagogy.
Depending on the participants’ educational and professional background, some statistically significant results in teachers’ beliefs have been identified due to the essential difference in the opportunities for professional development for urban and rural teachers.
A discussion on what impacts the EFL teachers’ conceptions of critical thinking and recommendations for further research, in general, will be provided.

Author

• Xeniya Tursunbayeva, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools