Results of Critical Thinking Teaching Competency Development Using Teachers’ Collaborative Learning and Action Research Approaches in a Large Private School

Abstract

The objectives of this research are : 1) to study the effectiveness of the teacher training  package towards the teachers’ competency in analyzing the curriculum, plan of teaching management, application of the developed  teaching  plan into the classroom and students’ behavior towards the critical thinking teaching; to investigate the causes and obstruction against critical thinking classroom management;  2) to find out the development to teach critical thinking of Mathayom Suksa teachers. This research selected 15 teachers in the secondary school from the five main different departments by purposive sampling and simple random sampling techniques in Mathayom Suksa 1, Semester 1, 2012, including their 119 students and heads of the five main different departments. The instrument of this research is the teacher training package: the critical thinking teaching for teachers’ cooperative teaching. The instrument also included the questionnaire about the correlation between the subject matter and the critical thinking teaching strategy, training follow up evaluation form, the observation form of the classroom  management, the observation form of students’ behavior and the recording form indicating the effectiveness of students critical thinking skills, after undertaking development with the training package. The data were statistically analyzed by mean, standard deviation. The research results were as follow;

            1.Teacher’s competency in analyzing the curriculum, the plan of teaching management and  application of                           developed teaching plan into the classroom are very suitable. Teachers can consider indicators, contents and                     tasks that are towards the critical thinking. Then, teachers can utilize the lesson plan to promote the students’                   ability to practice thinking process and also solve some problems in class or adjust the plan along with the                          learning environment considerably and reasonably.

1.   The students’ development toward critical thinking’s of students is a great deal of actions. The percentage increased by checking their behaviors in taking the lesson plans in the first, the second and the third lesson plan.
2.    Problems, trouble and editing about teacher’s critical thinking teaching are unclear understanding in the indicators and the difference of each teacher’s competency in analyzing, synthesis thinking, decisions and solving problems. But taking collaborative learning supported teachers are better in knowledge, thinking process, making activities towards the indicators and thinking behavior. The teachers focus in making activities, contents, changing knowledge each other in the departments, then they are able to create the tasks which promotes students’ critical thinking. Some teachers are lack of classroom management skill. So they have to reflect their thoughts in classroom activities management. The other suggestion is for academic department to set the same available for each teacher in each department. The teachers are better at classroom management.