Value-loaded critical thinking in philosophical dialogues

The aim of this dissertation is to provide insight into how whole-class, teacher-led, philosophical dialogues can contribute to students’ value-loaded critical thinking. A full educational design study was conducted in four phases. The first exploratory study provided insight into the teaching strategies for promoting value-loaded critical thinking that secondary school philosophy teachers were already applying. In the second study, design principles were developed, implemented and evaluated. This resulted in five design principles for teaching value-loaded critical thinking during philosophical dialogues, in a transfer-oriented manner. The third study evaluated the effects of an intervention consisting of a professional development program for teachers and whole-class, teacher-led, philosophical dialogues on students’ value-loaded critical thinking skills in transfer tasks. The results indicated that the intervention contributed to students’ value-loaded critical thinking. In the fourth study, the quality of the classroom dialogues was evaluated. The results revealed that the dialogues in the experimental condition contained significantly more meta-level reflection than the dialogues in the comparison condition. An additional qualitative analysis was conducted to describe the different kinds of meta-level reflection in detail. All in all, this dissertation demonstrates that philosophical dialogues in which teachers implement the design principles for value-loaded critical thinking, contributes to students’ value-loaded critical thinking. Moreover, it provides ample illustrative examples and teaching strategies for teaching value-loaded critical thinking in dialogue.