The Equation of Critical Thinking Skills, Professional Identity and Professional Development in Iranian EFL Teachers Context

Teaching as one of the most complicated jobs among all educational professions involves among other things the interplay of language teachers, policy makers and educational settings. Among these, teachers’ qualifications including skills, knowledge and personality are factors that lead to the failure or success of the profession. Accordingly, teachers need to be well aware of their profession requirements. Hence, the main purpose of this study was to scrutinize the network of associations among teachers’ professional development (PD), professional Identity (PI), and their critical thinking skills (CTS). Using a stratified sampling method, 283 Iranian EFL teachers from Ilam and Kermanshah city participated in this study and took three standardized questionnaires. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was run to analyze the data and test the path model of the study. The SEM results showed that there is a close relationship among teachers’ CTS, PI and subsequently PD with acceptable goodness of fit indices. Furthermore, the findings revealed that there are significant interrelationships among some subscales of the main variables. It was also shown that as the consequences of promoting CTS and under particular conditions, teachers’ professional understanding undergoes drastic changes. The findings have various implications for language teachers and practitioners.

کلیدواژه ها:

professional development ، professional Identity ، critical thinking skills ، EFL teachers1