Daiva Jakavonytė-Staškuvienė & Jovita Ponomariovienė

Expressing Critical Thinking Among Primary School Teachers When Creating an Educational Environment That Provides Opportunities for Students to Set Short-term Goals and Reflect on Them

Expressing Critical Thinking Among Primary School Teachers When Creating an Educational Environment That Provides Opportunities for Students to Set Short-term Goals and Reflect on Them

Daiva Jakavonytė-Staškuvienė & Jovita Ponomariovienė

Academy of Education, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania

Abstract

Reflection is widely recognised as one of the essential lifelong learning skills that greatly influences continuous personal and professional development. It is one of the key competencies in primary, secondary, and higher education systems as it enables students to analyse, evaluate, and actively learn (Colomer et al., 2020). Reflection connects past and new experiences with existing knowledge and skills; it allows critical evaluation of new experiences and their connections with previous skills in various contexts, focusing attention on future transformations (Bassachs et al., 2020; Cañabate et al., 2020). Reflection can also help identify the unique learning style(s) of each student in terms of systemic thinking, general and specific abilities, attitudes, and emotions (Bubnys, 2019).

        The aim of the research is to investigate, during activity research, what short-term, one-week personal goals primary school students can independently set and how they are able to reflect on the methods of reaching goals and the results achieved while fostering reflection and self-assessment skills in appropriate conditions.

        Research objectives:

• Discuss how to create a reflective learning environment conducive to fostering critical thinking skills for both teachers and students.
• Conduct a qualitative content analysis of students' personal journals discussing students' self-set learning goals and their implementation decisions in the development of reflection skills.

         Conclusions. Systematic application of learning reflection can help change formal learning habits and improve students' learning outcomes as metacognitive skills developed during reflection serve as one of the most important factors influencing conscious learning (Kulgemeyer et al., 2021). Reflection can facilitate the definition of individualised learning paths for acquiring knowledge, developing specific competencies, and applying acquired experience in the relevant context (Sachs et al., 2019).

Learning journals are understood as ongoing reflective writing related to learning content or the learning process. The method of learning journals is most commonly used in universities or school lessons but it should not be used in a content-free space; instead, it should be linked to specific learning and action situations.

Keywords: Short-term learning goal setting and implementation, reflection, experiences, primary school students, school case.

Biographies

Daiva Jakavonytė-Staškuvienė: Professor, Head of the Didactics Research Cluster, Academy of Education, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. European Commission Inspector of Pre-school and Primary Education in European Schools, Representative of Lithuania. Research interests include curriculum theory, pedagogy, general didactics, didactics of elementary language arts education, integrated didactics of languages, cooperative learning, assessment of students’ learning and progress, teacher leadership that transforms educational practice. Email: .

Jovita Ponomariovienė: PhD student in Education, Academy of Education, Vytautas Magnus University, head of a private school, Lithuania. Research interests include competency-based education in various subjects at the elementary school level within the contexts of both private and public schools, quality of educational practice, innovative didactics. Email: .