Restructuring Teacher Education Programs To Teach Higher-order Thinking Skills

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose guidelines for restructuring teacher education programs for higher-order thinking skills and propose a framework to improve the conceptualization and implementation of these skills to prospective and serving teachers to enable them to teach those skills effectively.

Abstract: The fact that pre-service and in-service teacher education programs, with some exceptions, have not systematically incorporated the teaching of thinking into the professional curriculum is disturbing in view of the growing interest in teaching thinking skills explicitly in schools. Even in the case of teacher education programs which have incorporated the teaching of thinking, there seems to be an urgent need to improve the conceptualization and implementation of these skills to prospective and serving teachers to enable them to teach those skills effectively. Data available suggest that teachers, even those who have been trained, in general, find it problematic to effectively infuse thinking skills into content instruction. This calls for a need to re-examine the ways in which prospective and serving teachers are taught. The re-examination of teacher education programs need to pay attention, among others, to recent findings from works on teacher learning. There seems to be a need for teacher education programs to find systematic efforts to both improve the thinking of prospective and serving teachers and to prepare them to become successful teachers of thinking. This is because there are numerous recent works on specific teacher behaviours that promote student thinking. This paper will attempt to propose guidelines for restructuring teacher education programs for higher-order thinking skills. This paper will be prepared on data obtained for a research on teaching higher-order thinking skills and current efforts in Malaysia to incorporate thinking into teacher education programs.