A vital prerequisite for creating and participating in culture without which we hardly understand or act effectively in the modern world, critical thinking has undoubtedly become an essential task of contemporary education. This paper aims at comparing declarative attitudes towards critical thinking and authentic classroom behaviour of primary education teachers. Two questions applying to two separate research areas (self-evaluation and application of teaching strategies) will be asked: whether teachers think critically and how they evaluate and react to it in classroom interaction. Following E. Aronson, T.D. Wilson and R.M. Akert (1997) three aspects of teachers’ attitudes will be distinguished: their knowledge and opinion of critical thinking (cognitive aspect), predispositions to such behavior expressed by critical thinking stimulation, reflectiveness and working style (behavioral aspect) as well as emotional attitude towards criticism (emotional aspect). The question of how to diagnose and develop critical thinking has been raised by many researchers. Their studies of both the theory and practical application of critical thinking may be found in numerous books. A. Fisher (2006) defines critical thinking as skilled and active interpretation and evaluation of observations and information. R. Paul, A.J.A. Binker, D. Weil (1995) link it with the introduction of the elements of Socratic discussion as well as with dialectic and dialogical thinking characterized by clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, consistency, logic, significance, adequacy and fairness. J.L. Kincheloe (2000) identifies critical thinking with reflectiveness, resistance and scepticism. Despite relatively numerous publications on critical thinking diagnosis, e.g, R. Ennis (2003), there exist few reports on the assessment of primary education teachers’ knowledge and attitudes towards critical thinking. Modern civilization, however, with its information chaos, intrusive omnipresence of aggressive advertising and the tendency to the indiscriminate use of Internet resources requires that teachers get children into the habit of critical analysis of the information they encounter already at a very early age. To develop critical thinking in their pupils teachers should recognize this type of thinking as significant and be critical thinkers themselves. Such an attitude requires cognitive curiosity, an ability to formulate important questions (Dantonio, Beisenheerz, 2001) and circumspection in one’s choice of information to be received, as well as reflection and objectiveness. Teachers should create the atmosphere of respect for truth, dialogue and freedom in class (Costa, 2001), support their pupils’ interests and passions (Czaja-Chudyba, 2005) as well as help to search for and critically assess various information sources.

The conducted research focused on 117 teachers with an average 8-year professional experience in primary education. The first stage consisted in the structured observation (event sampling method) of one-day school activities and in the application of the projective sentence completion test. It was followed by a diagnostic survey (a questionnaire and a structured interview). The observation yielded data in five domains: teacher-created classroom atmosphere (conformity - independence, constraint - freedom, ignoring - inspiring), teaching strategies (directiveness - negotiation, imposing – stimulating questions, conventionality – adjusting meanings), contents (explicitness – ambiguity, non-reflectiveness – problematization), materials (single perspective – many options) and pupil control methods (standardization – individualization). The first stage revealed teachers’ self-evaluation and their subconscious attitudes towards critical thinking. The questionnaire and structured interview show teachers’ knowledge, actual response to children’s in-class behaviour and declarative attitudes towards the following: independence, autonomy, resistance, courage, objectiveness, fairness, scepticism, information sources evaluation, professional self-improvement and reflectiveness.

The initial result analysis indicated ambivalence in teachers’ attitude towards critical thinking. In the domain of their convictions teachers usually identify critical thinking with fault finding, notice only its negative and emotionally troublesome consequences (shame, anger, the risk of ridicule and authority loss, anxiety not to disturb interpersonal relationships). Frequently teachers state their knowledge is insufficient to think critically. But on the declarative level positive attitudes predominate; teachers appreciate the value of objectiveness, fairness, independence and self-improvement. However, observations revealed that in practice teachers suppress pupils’ criticism, fear questions, require obedience, present one-sided knowledge imposing conventional standard answers. The obtained results correspond with the findings of R. Paul, A.J. Binker and D. Weil (1995) and S. Cottrell (2005) revealing the most frequent barriers for critical thinking development. They manifest the need for propagating the importance of tutoring teachers and pedagogical faculty students in critical thinking.