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CHANGING THE TEACHING METHODOLOGY: HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

"The paper describes selected results of a multifaceted intervention study aimed primarily at nurturing and assessing critical thinking (CT) competence in a sample of primary school children in the North-East of Italy. The core of the study comprises the implementation of a new learning framework considered effective in promoting thinking and problem-solving skills, the development of an assessment tool to appraise CT performances during peer dialogue tasks, and the comparison over time of the results achieved by participants in the intervention and control classes. As part of the same research, an exploratory survey was undertaken through a voluntary questionnaire with the twofold aim of knowing the most common teaching style among primary school teachers in the region and selecting the experimental classes. The analysis of the questionnaire data showed that the use of traditional methods is still prevalent among teachers. Italian schools have a tradition of using content-based approaches and, since these are considered ineffective in promoting CT competence, one of the research questions of the study, and the focus of this paper, was how teachers deal with the implementation of a new learning framework and whether it enables them to change their teaching towards more student-centered approaches. For this purpose, the 13 teachers in the experimental group were first trained about the “Thinking Actively in a Social Context” (TASC; Wallace, 2001) learning framework. After its implementation in the experimental classes for nine months, data were collected through logbooks, lesson plans, and a final questionnaire. Furthermore, data collected from those sources were analyzed and the words of teachers from formal and informal communications were considered. Throughout the implementation period, quantitative (e.g., number of TASC learning plans implemented) and qualitative (e.g., ways in which teachers had applied the learning framework) differences in the TASC use were observed among teachers. One group stayed with traditional approaches, keeping a more teacher-centered focus, another small group used TASC from a student-centered perspective, and a smaller group accommodated their usual learning plans within the TASC framework. Although some teachers had difficulty applying the new approach, most of them found it valuable in challenging their teaching style. The costs for changing teaching methods include extended times to fully develop the school curriculum with student-centered approaches and teachers’ efforts to re-frame practices and explore strategies within new learning perspectives. Both aspects should be taken into account when rethinking school system reforms and the training of future teachers."