Professionalism as a Predictor of Reflective Teaching and Criticality of EFL Teachers

The professional development of EFL teachers is supposed to include and be related to many of the teacher’s characteristics that develop during their professional teaching practice. EFL teachers' critical thinking and reflective teaching can also be influenced by their developing cognitive and meta-cognitive professional skills and competencies. This study investigated the relationship between the professional development of EFL teachers and their reflective teaching and critical thinking. It also investigated whether any component(s) of professional development would best predict reflective teaching and critical thinking. To this end, 45 Iranian EFL teachers in Sanandaj participated in the study. They completed three questionnaires as follows. One was a Teachers’ Professional Development Questionnaire to measure the participant teachers’ professional development. The second questionnaire was a Teachers’ Reflective Thinking Questionnaire to assess the participants’ reflective thinking. The third questionnaire was a Critical Thinking Appraisal Form to measure the participants’ critical thinking. Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient was calculated to check the correlation of professional development and its subscales with reflective teaching and critical thinking. Multiple standard regression was run to check whether any component(s) of professional development would predict reflective teaching and critical thinking. The results indicated that out of the three components of professional development, namely, subject-matter field, dedicated field, and pedagogical field, it was the pedagogical field that significantly correlated with and predicted both reflective teaching and critical thinking.