TEACHERS’ CONCEPTIONS ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES IN PAKISTAN

Educational experts unanimously agree that critical thinking must be the part of learning process. Critical thinking became a serious challenge in all disciplines in higher education institutes. Studies show that critical assessment of knowledge received by learners can make learners more critical thinkers, professionals, reflective thinkers, and active participants. A mixed method study design was adopted to achieve mentioned objectives in this research The researcher randomly selected 100 university teachers related to twenty universities (ten public and ten private sectors) in the province Punjab. The researcher analysed the gathered data through percentage, mean, standard deviation. It was concluded that developing the CT skills was not the priority of teachers. They did not inquire concept based questions from learners regularly, arrange tasks for utilizing material in new circumstances, did not arrange presentations for concept clarity in better way, unable to conduct activities for application of theories in new circumstances. They also did not give more value to CR-based activities in the classrooms, did not use interactive techniques during lectures in classrooms. According to them, class size is not suitable for the promotion of free-thinking skills and frequent questions are not asked from pupils in which they may judge their evidence based logical ability in the classrooms due to overcrowded class schedule. On the other hand, most of the English language teachers confessed that they give more value to content-based tasks in the classrooms, may ask students or connecting knowledge from various areas to create original work, choose activities that stimulate active learning in the classrooms, challenge the pupils for defending their point of view logically in the classrooms, assign the tasks of deductive and inductive reasoning, use the role playing techniques in the classrooms based upon higher mean value of the item. They confessed that completion of content is very important than scholars' learning for an English language teacher, traditional time restrictions of English language teachers refrain them from adjusting CT skills, academic learning atmosphere facilitates English language teachers for nurturing