6. Strategies of planning to be able to equip children with competences enabling them to think critically and work creatively in the „Life Long Learning” process

Thinking questions

• What is critical thinking?
• Why should children be taught to become critical thinkers?
• How would critical thinking skills foster EFL teachers’ work?
• What competences should have EFL teachers when developing children’s critical thinking?

 Elder and Paul (1994)[1] argue that critical thinking means that thinkers take charge of their own thinking. This also presupposes that people develop sound criteria and standards for analysing and evaluating their own thinking processes and use of these criteria to improve the quality of their thinking (Uden & Beaumont, 2006)[2].

Sternberg supports the view that there are three categories of components of critical thinking: a) meta-components, that is, high-order mental processes which are employed in order to plan, monitor, and evaluate what the individual is doing, b) performance components which refer to the actual steps the individual takes, and c) knowledge-acquisition components, which refer to processes which individuals employ so as to relate old material to new material and to apply new material (Sternberg, 1990)[3].

Children will need entirely new skills throughout their life. Employers are looking forward to people and professionals who have the skills and competences to learn new things. Thus young learners should be helped to become aware that later in their career thy will need to take advantage of self-development, self motivation and trainings on their continuous professional development. Language learning at a young age is a good opportunity to make children experience what the stages of effecting learning might be, for example,

• to experience
• to reflect
• to acquire
• to evaluate

The central elements of life long learning[4] are

• personal and professional development
• critical, creative thinking and
• economic development and fulfilment of a nation

Later in learners’ career critical thinking will

• Increases academic knowledge
• Encourages intellectual curiosity
• Strengthens the ability to analyze and evaluate
• Promotes understanding of social diversity and worldviews
• Improves research, writing, and oral communication skills
• Helps to construct and deconstruct arguments to rationally defend one's opinions
• Fosters independent learning and strong group/team participation.