A Lesson Study On Cultivating Critical Thinking Through Cooperative Learning In Junior High School English Class

Critical thinking requires students to attack or analyze a problem from different perspectives.This ability is supposed to be developed in junior high school when students’ logical thinking and judgement are shaped rapidly.However,most students are used to receiving knowledge from teachers passively.It is highly urgent for teachers to be aware and strategic to foster students’ critical thinking in English class.As an effective method to motivate students to think and analyze,cooperative learning is usually used in English class.With cooperative learning,students can improve their critical thinking by sharing,analyzing and evaluating different opinions.Teachers can record,monitor and reflect on teaching to explore how to improve students’ critical thinking by means of Lesson Study,which is the drive of this study.This study intends to answer the following questions: 1)How to design teaching in order to cultivate critical thinking through cooperative learning? In this part,teachers’ roles and task features in cooperative learning were discussed.2)How well are students’ critical thinking developed by means of cooperative learning? In order to answer this question,students’ performances and products were analyzed.82 students from two classes in a junior middle school in Tianjin were selected as the research participants.Cooperative learning activities in teaching were focused to explore the task features and the teacher’s roles.Students’ performance and compositions were collected to check the effects of teaching.Two rounds of teaching were conducted on the same teaching material.The second round was implemented based on the teaching effects gained by means of the observation scales as well as the teacher’s reflection for the purpose of improvement.Based on the results of Lesson Study,some insight of task design and teacher’s role in cooperative learning for critical thinking were perceived and summarized.The tasks should be open and challenging enough to illustrate students’ critical ideas.Moreover,the tasks should be as much as close to students’ interests and experiences.The effects of cooperative learning largely depend on teacher’s instruction and organization.Teacher’s roles as a facilitator,cooperator and instructor were experienced and deeply perceived by the author.The output of students’ performance shows they can share ideas with each other,and evaluate opinions from other group members.To some extent,their critical thinking was reflected in the process of solving the problem.The results of Lesson Study are expected to provide reference for novice teachers who are interested in connecting critical thinking and cooperative learning in teaching practice in junior high school.