Investigating Iranian EFL Teachers? Reflective Teaching and their Critical Thinking Abilities

Reflective teaching as a relatively new concept within mainstream education has caught a great deal of attention. There is theoretical evidence on the close link between reflective teaching and critical thinking. In fact, reflective teaching has been considered a requisite dimension of developing critical thinking skills. However, despite the existence of theoretical evidence, there is little, if any empirical evidence on the link between critical thinking and reflective teaching, to fill this gap. The present study aimed to examine the role of reflective teaching in critical thinking ability of Iranian EFL teachers. A number of 101 EFL institute teachers participated in this study. The Persian version (Faravani, 2006) of the WatsonGlaser Critical Thinking Appraisal-Form A (1980) and the teacher reflectivity questionnaire developed by Akbari, Behzadpour and Dadvand (2010) were distributed among the teachers. The results of the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient and two-way ANOVA revealed that that there was a significant relationship between the two variables. However, there was no significant difference between reflective teaching of male and female high and low critical thinkers. The study has some implications for teacher trainers to consider the effective characteristics of reflectivity and critical thinking when holding teacher training courses.