Abstract:

What do we expect from our children to learn in schools? We, as a parents and teachers, have all different expectations and we consider different things to be of a paramount importance. We can lengthily discuss about the amount of learning content and particular subjects, and whether it is necessary to build on scientific thinking (STEM subjects) or focus on languages, so that our children will be successful in our rapidly changing and multicultural world. However, one thing that almost everybody concerned with education agrees on is that we should promote critical and creative thinking skills, so that the students will be able to think independently, look for information and filter them according to their reliability and validity and to be able to reflect upon them and their own thinking.

Teaching critical thinking together with promoting creativity is one of the most often declared aim of education. However, the reality in schools is often different. Independent and creative thinking is not encouraged in classrooms, as it usually threatens teacher´s authority.

This fact holds true for primary education (with implicit or explicit belief that so young children have not yet developed necessary skills, e.g. formal rules for thinking), secondary education (with implicit or explicit belief that children can have the developed the necessary skills, but it is generally more suitable to have them under control), but even for tertiary education and pre-service teachers training. Students at pedagogical faculties learn that creativity is important, theoretically, but their whole learning experience lack any sign of creativity on the side of their teachers. They learn for exams, they repeat from books what they teachers want to hear, but they rarely see creative teaching in action. How can we then expect that they will know how to make it work in their own classrooms, when (if) they start to teach?

Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present possible ways how to promote critical and reflective thinking in psychology courses for future teachers. One of the main arguments here is that it is impossible to teach reflective thinking, if we, as teachers, are not models of reflective teaching. Importance of reflecting one´s own thinking, being aware of many possible cognitive fallacies and biases and ability to subject one´s own beliefs to scrutiny is the main aim of education of reflective thinking in Psychology courses for future teachers. Hope is that by challenging the system of training pre-service teachers, we will help pre-service teachers to develop their own kind of reflective teaching, and thus promote reflective and critical thinking of their future students.

Keywords:

Cognitive reflection, cognitive biases, reflective teaching, creativity, critical thinking.