Primary first and second stages teachers? reflective thinking tendencies

Today, training individuals having high-level skills such as creative thinking, reflective thinking, decision making and critical thinking has become an important necessity to compete in contemporary world for the societies. Teachers have an important place to develop those high-level thinking skills. The purpose of this research is to determine reflective thinking tendencies of primary school teachers working in the 1st and 2nd Stages. In the direction of this aim, level of reflective thinking tendency of teachers was investigated. The teachers were administered Reflective Thinking Tendency Scale developed by Semerci (2007). The scale consists of seven sub-scales named continuous and intentional thinking, open- mindness, effective and interrogated teaching, responsibility of teaching and science, foresighted and sincere, researcher and looking professional. Independent groups t test and One way ANOVA were used to analyze the data. At the result of the analysis, it was determined that the female teachers were more open minded and they had a more positive view to the teaching profession than male teachers. It was found that the teachers, who had more professional seniority, had higher reflective thinking tendency. It was also determined that that teachers, who graduated from Faculty of Education, had more negative views towards teaching profession than those who graduated from other faculties. The teachers who taught less-crowded classrooms were more open-minded and had a more positive view than the teachers who taught in crowded classrooms. Besides, it has been determined that majority of the teachers in current research haven?t taken any in-service training related to reflective thinking.Key Words: Thinking, Reflective Thinking, Thinking Skills