Teaching critical thinking is often reduced to asking students to question sources, justify an answer, or detect faulty reasoning. These skills matter, yet they capture only part of what happens when people think together. A student may defend a position very well and still fail to listen, reconsider, or understand how someone else reached a different conclusion.
A study of Norwegian primary-school teachers takes this social side of critical thinking seriously. It fits naturally within my broader work on teaching and pedagogy because it examines how an ambitious curriculum goal is translated into everyday classroom practice.
Summary of the Study
Alexandre Dessingué and David Wagner followed five teachers involved in Critical Literacies and Awareness in Education, a European professional-development project. The teachers worked in Norwegian language and social studies with pupils in grades five to seven. Researchers and teachers met over several years to discuss critical-thinking theory, design activities, test them in classrooms, and reflect on what happened. The paper draws mainly on two rounds of teacher interviews conducted during the project, with the teachers’ activity logs used to prompt discussion about concrete practices.
The teachers quickly identified pupil involvement as a necessary condition for critical thinking. They selected topics connected to pupils’ lives, used local issues, introduced dilemmas, and asked provocative questions that gave students a reason to participate. Engagement alone was not enough.
Teachers wanted pupils to form independent views, justify them with knowledge, and contribute within clear rules for listening and respectful exchange. This is an important distinction: lively talk can remain intellectually thin if students merely announce opinions without examining the reasons behind them.
Two teaching paths became visible. Some teachers placed greater emphasis on dialogue, arranging discussions in which pupils expressed ideas, listened carefully, and worked to understand other positions. Others concentrated more heavily on metacognition through self-assessment, reflection, and questions such as why pupils thought what they thought. The paths were complementary.
Together they helped teachers understand critical thinking as a way of participating in a shared inquiry, where students examine knowledge, monitor their own reasoning, and remain open to revision. Several teachers reported that their own conception moved beyond winning arguments or displaying isolated skills toward a broader attitude of curiosity, responsibility, and openness.
The study gives us a detailed account of teacher learning, though its evidence of pupil development is indirect. The sample includes five teachers from one national setting, one teacher completed only the first interview, and the researchers worked closely with participants throughout the project.
That relationship may have supported honest reflection, but it may also have encouraged accounts that matched the project’s aims. Changes in engagement, questioning, listening, and reflection were reported by teachers; they were not established through classroom observations, student interviews, or direct measures of critical thinking. The paper supports claims about how teachers’ practices and conceptions developed. It cannot tell us with the same confidence how much pupils’ critical thinking changed.
Practical Insights
The paper is useful because the teachers’ methods are simple enough to adapt across subjects while still demanding careful preparation.
- Begin with a problem pupils can enter. A local debate, familiar dilemma, disputed interpretation, or connection between past and present gives students something they can genuinely think about. Relevance opens the conversation; the teacher still has to deepen it.
- Ask for reasons after opinions. Questions such as “What makes you think that?”, “What evidence supports it?”, and “What would change your mind?” move classroom talk beyond preference. Students learn that a view becomes more useful when its grounds can be examined.
- Teach listening as part of critical thinking. Ask students to restate a classmate’s position fairly before responding. They can also identify one point they understood better after hearing another perspective. Critical dialogue requires comprehension as well as rebuttal.
- Build participation rules with the class. Students need clear expectations for disagreement, turn-taking, evidence, and personal comments. An open discussion does not mean every claim carries equal weight or that harmful behaviour goes unchallenged.
- Add a metacognitive pause. After a discussion, students can write what they initially believed, what influenced their thinking, which argument they found strongest, and what remains uncertain. This connects public dialogue with private examination of thought.
- Assess the process. Criteria might include giving reasons, using evidence, asking productive questions, listening accurately, reconsidering a claim, and contributing constructively. If assessment rewards only the final answer, students receive little reason to practise the thinking that produced it.
The idea I take from this study is that critical thinking is partly a relationship with one’s own mind and partly a relationship with other people. Students need the confidence to form a view, the discipline to examine it, and the openness to let dialogue change what they understand.
Reference
Dessingué, A., & Wagner, D. A. (2025). Promoting dialogical critical thinking in education: Examining teachers’ practices and conceptualizations in the Norwegian school context. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 57(2), 184–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2024.2334937
