The Future of Education

Critical thinking, one of the 21st century skills along with entrepreneurship, problem solving and digital competences, has been on the new and comprehensive Skills Agenda for Europe (https://ec.europa.eu). These skills are considered fundamental to learning in the Digital Era  (Gardner, 2008; Trilling and Fadel, 2009). The Skills Agenda adopted by the European Commission in 2016 points out that improving these skills will allow people to fulfil their potential as confident and active professionals and citizens. In this context, developing critical thinking skills has been a hot issue in educational institutes at all levels. Critical thinking can be briefly defined as an active process with unique and intentional thinking (Dewey, 1909; Paul, 1995). Finding out the critical thinking dispositions of teacher candidates and enhancing them is expected to be the part of contemporary teacher education since the candidates function as change agents for their learners. The purpose of this study is to investigate the critical thinking dispositions of language teacher candidates  and find out the behavioral indicators of their critical thinking dispositions. The study is a qualitative one and the data has been collected through the questionnaire developed by the researchers. The participants, who are the academic staff members of the Education Faculties,have been asked to state the behavioral indicators of the candidates’ critical thinking dispositions based on their teaching experiences and observations.The findings may lead to discussions and recommendations for teacher educators who are responsible for helping teacher candidates  gain more critical thinking skills.

Key words: Critical Thinking Skills,Language Teacher Candidates, 21st.century skills, Teacher Education;