Teaching strategies for value-loaded critical thinking in philosophy classroom dialogues

An important aim in education is that students learn to think critically about moral values. In this exploratory multiple case study, we analyze teaching strategies to promote value-loaded critical thinking in philosophical whole-class dialogues. We observed 15 philosophy classroom dialogues, led by five experienced philosophy teachers, and we selected seven dialogues in which moral values were explicitly discussed for further qualitative analysis. In these value-loaded dialogues, we identified three categories of teaching strategies that were used by the teachers to promote critical thinking about moral values: teaching strategies for 1) addressing, 2) applying and 3) arguing about moral values. We also looked for transfer-oriented teaching strategies and found that the teachers made the learning content more meaningful and created intercontextuality; however, we found no examples of metacognitive reflection. In this paper, we give a detailed description of the identified teaching strategies.