Tools for developing critical thinking in future teachers as elements of the educational environment of a higher education institution

Abstract

The publication focuses on approaches to the development of critical thinking of students of pedagogical specialities, tools that increase the effectiveness of this process, their correlation with the components of the educational environment of higher education institutions.
It is established that this problem is considered in the following areas: the essence of the concept of “critical thinking” in scientific discourse; the peculiarities of organising pedagogical influence on the development of the studied skill in schoolchildren and students by various forms, methods and means; the dependence of the level of its formation on value orientations, gender, and the discipline being studied.
A review of domestic scientific and pedagogical studies is carried out, which describes the use of various tools for the development of critical thinking of future teachers in full-time study, blended and distance learning formats: practical cases, situational tasks, philosophical dialogues, electronic tools, media resources, various methods and technologies (interactive, digital, informational, contextual learning).
The attention is focused on approaches to characterising the educational environment of a higher education institution, among which the following classification of components seems to be the most appropriate for highlighting this problem: social, didactic and spatial-subjective. Considering the tools for the development of critical thinking through the prism of these components, we state that they belong to the didactic (teaching and educational environment) and spatial-subjective (classroom equipment, educational institutions where students receive practical training, museum environment). 
The use of tools for the development of critical thinking of students majoring in 013 “Primary Education” is improved on the example of such disciplines as: “Fundamentals and Methods of Teaching Civic and Historical Education”, “Development of Critical Thinking of Primary School Students”, “Methods of Teaching Social and Health Education” and others. Effective tools in this process include: educational digital resources (“Interland”, “I study – I don’t wait”, “LearningАpps”, “Coggle”, “Google Earth”), social advertising, various groups of educational media content (audio, visual, audiovisual), methods and strategies for developing critical thinking (“One Minute”, “Circle Discussion”, “Continuous Scale of Opinions”, “Take / change your position”, “Venn diagram” etc.), learning technologies (“crosscutting learning”, “participatory learning”, “immersion, living from the inside”), exercises of the Swiss-Ukrainian DOCCU project (“Napkin”, “Bouquet”, “Chinese chopsticks”, “World Cafe”, “Driver and Car”).