ADAPTIVE STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING

The present study aims to evaluate critical thinking in students and teachers from their perceptions and identify adaptive strategies that allow enhancing critical thinking. From a sociocritical paradigm and mixed approach, a concurrent design is deployed that allowed a survey and an interview to be applied simultaneously to 59 students and 15 basic education teachers in a private educational institution in Lima Norte, considering three dimensions of critical thinking: 1.- empathic understanding, 2.- problem solving and 3.- metacognition. The results show that both groups have the perception of a high level of critical thinking (84.7% high in students and 93.3% high in teachers). However, the qualitative phase allowed us to verify that there are challenges in the development of critical thinking, revealing dynamic adaptive strategies such as; for empathic understanding: 1.- proactive self-awareness strategies, 2.- empathic experiential inquiry strategies, and 3.- prospective consolidation strategies, for problem solving, 1.- divergent deconstruction strategies, and 2.construction strategies convergent, and for metacognition, 1.- projective self-management metacognitive strategies. It concludes considering the potentialities of the study for the global development of critical thinking of educational actors.