Training for Teacher Trainers – Creativity and Critical Thinking

Presentation

This Professional Learning Programme (PLP): Training for Teacher Trainers – Creativity and Critical Thinking aims to build upon and strengthen teacher trainers’ competencies to lead impactful and effective professional learning focused on fostering and assessing Creativity and Critical Thinking as part of subject teaching, notably in science and maths.

The programme prepares teacher trainers to design, facilitate, adapt, implement, and evaluate professional learning aligned with the OECD Creativity and Critical thinking frameworks and the Portuguese national curriculum priorities. It combines theoretical foundations with practical design work, modelling, collaborative reflection, and practical application.

The teacher trainers will develop an understanding of how to teach subject knowledge, with an emphasis on science and maths, while developing students’ creative and critical thinking by learning about the OECD Creativity and Critical thinking framework, its conceptual underpinnings, and the signature pedagogies that cultivate creativity and critical thinking. Participants will explore classroom dialogue, assessment practices, feedback strategies, facilitation techniques, and approaches to building trust, autonomy, and comfort with uncertainty in pedagogical practice. They will progressively design lesson plans, assessment tools, feedback strategies, locally relevant teacher training materials and a draft professional learning programme implementable in their local context. Participants will also explore the opportunities, risks and implications of both teacher and student use of GenAI to support creativity and critical thinking. The course integrates in-person workshops, synchronous online sessions, and independent personal and collective work.

Degree

Stand-Alone Course Units

Duration

135 hours: 42 hours in-person; 16 hours online – synchronous; 77 hours of independent study

Regime

(Português) Regime pós-laboral e b-Learning

CNAEF Area

(Português) 140

School

ESE - Escola Superior de Educação

Reasons to attend the course

This programme strengthens teacher trainers’ competences to foster and assess creativity and critical thinking in classroom practice, with a particular focus on science and mathematics.

It integrates OECD frameworks with national curriculum priorities, combining theoretical foundations with practical application.

Participants will design and deliver context-relevant professional learning with direct impact on teaching practice.

Coordinator

Maria de Fátima de Sousa Pereira

Professor Adjunto

Coordinator

Maria de Fátima de Sousa Pereira

Professor Adjunto

Links

Document

Access conditions

Primary, secondary and higher education teachers

Coordinator

Maria de Fátima de Sousa Pereira

Professor Adjunto

Links

Document

Goals

Knowledge

By the end of the programme, participants will be able to:

Clearly articulate what creativity/critical thinking does and does not look like in the classroom.
Identify opportunities to support creativity and/or critical thinking with an emphasis on science and maths classrooms.
Recognise the relationship between creativity, critical thinking subject knowledge and learning and apply this to future planning and facilitation.
Understand assessment principles aligned with creativity and critical thinking.
Recognize design criteria for strengthening Creativity and Critical Thinking in science, maths and other classroom contexts.
Understand the opportunities and risks of Generative AI in education for fostering creativity and critical thinking.
Be aware of the OECD frameworks and tools on creativity and critical thinking, how they can be implemented and how they relate to other frameworks.

Skills

Participants will be able to:

Design and facilitate a professional learning programme that strengthens teachers’ ability to foster and assess creativity and critical thinking in the classroom.
Co-develop contextually relevant facilitation/teaching materials and examples that fit with the local curriculum.
Model teaching techniques that cultivate creativity and critical thinking.
Design lesson plans and assessment that develops subject knowledge and fosters creativity/critical thinking in engaging and meaningful ways.

Attitudes:

Participants will be encouraged to:

Engage in self-reflection as facilitators and pedagogical leaders.
Value uncertainty, ambiguity and productive struggle as necessary conditions for learning.
Engage constructively in communities of practice.
Demonstrate openness to uncertainty, dialogue, and feedback.
Practice professional judgment toward use of GenAI in the classroom.

Professional outcomes

(Português) Os participantes serão capazes de:

Conceber e dinamizar programas de desenvolvimento profissional que reforcem a capacidade dos professores para promover e avaliar a criatividade e o pensamento crítico em contexto de sala de aula.
Co-desenvolver materiais de formação e exemplos didáticos contextualizados, adequados ao currículo local.
Modelar práticas pedagógicas que promovam a criatividade e o pensamento crítico.
Conceber planos de aula e estratégias de avaliação que desenvolvam o conhecimento disciplinar e promovam a criatividade e o pensamento crítico de forma envolvente e significativa.

Os participantes serão incentivados a:

Envolver-se em processos de autorreflexão enquanto facilitadores e líderes pedagógicos.
Valorizar a incerteza, a ambiguidade e o esforço produtivo como condições necessárias para a aprendizagem.
Participar de forma construtiva em comunidades de prática.
Demonstrar abertura à incerteza, ao diálogo e ao feedback.
Exercer julgamento profissional relativamente ao uso da Inteligência Artificial Generativa em contexto educativo.