How to Teach to Think Critically: the Teacher’s Role in Promoting Dialogical Critical Skills.

The aim of this study, part of a broader Erasmus+ project (STEP-Pedagogy of Citizenship and Teacher Training: an Alliance between School and Territory), was to identify different dialogue styles and explore the relationship between modes of teacher intervention and differential dialogical critical thinking skills in children. School as a democratic venue, where knowledge is also co-con- structed via debate, offers opportunities for pupils to take on active and respon- sible roles in experiential contexts. The teacher can play a key role in supporting the development of dialogical competence by encouraging classroom debates on socially acute questions. The dialogical practice is a vehicle for enhancing meaningful pupil engagement and increasing the quality of classroom interaction and pupils’ reasoning abilities. However, even today, teachers tend to make greater use of monological prac- tices than of dialogical ones. There is also a marked gap between theorizing on the verbal and non-verbal language required to foster learning and empirical research tapping into the type of communication that teachers implement in the classroom. This back- ground informed our exploratory study, in which we assessed selected class- room dialogues, with the additional goal of fostering the professional develop- ment of the participating teachers.