The Establishment of Thinking skills

after they graduate from the vocational schools. The competence above can be achieved through all activities in the CLD which involve the teachers and the students who explore the issues of teaching and define the solution by themselves. The teachers collaboratively discuss the problem faced by the students in the classroom. Constructivist classes reveal a shift of thinking in which the underlying assumptions about what knowledge is, about how people learn, and about what is important are different. One can grow from a traditional view of teaching in which one seeks to control one’s subject area and students to becoming comfortable with the shift in thinking that may be necessary to be a constructivist teacher. Lester and Onore 1990 indicate that teacher’s personal beliefs about teaching account for the kinds and extents of change that teachers are able to make. We view our situation through the lens of our personal construct system. Our beliefs about teaching and learning account for how we think and act as teachers. Teachers are individuals who are often drawn into teaching by a love of kids. Constructivist teachers develop skills and abilities to empower students and to make them feel competent and significant. Perhaps some of what a constructivist teacher does is intuitive. Constructivist teaching also requires intelligence, creativity, patience, responsiveness, and the ability to live with ambiguity permitting one to spontaneously abandon a plan in order to accommodate specific individual or classroom situations. And while the job of being a constructivist teacher is demanding, its value is evident in the impact on students’ learning and personal development.

3. The Establishment of Thinking skills

The stages in CLD especially question phase improve the thinking skill of the students. Marlowe and Page 1998: 25 state: The research base is clear and growing: active learning program in which students construct their own knowledge lead to the development of critical and independent thinking skills, deeper understanding of concepts and longer-lasting learning. In the CLD, the students are active during the lesson. There are some positive effects of active learning proposed by Marlowe and Page 1998: 32. a. It develops students’ abilities to think, plan and do b. It develops initiative c. It leads to better understanding of life d. It creates new studentteacher relationship e. It provides motivation f. It increases the students’ interest in school g. It leads students to read more h. It allows for more self-expression i. It leads to standards of achievement in subject areas high pt higher than in a traditional method. The teachers teach the students to think critically. Developing reasoning abilities requires greater reliance by teachers on learning technique that allows students to participate actively in discovering and creating their own solutions to problems. Teaching subjects grouped around integrating themes, for example, can help students to see systems rather than disconnected facts. Testing of students’ learning should require students to demonstrate the full range of thinking skills, rather than mere retention of facts. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989: 13. Students adapt learning to the real world, gaining problem solving skills and ability to do a critical analysis of a given set of data. These skills enable the student to adapt to a constantly changing real-world environment. Thus, classroom learning does not result in acquisition of absolute truth; it also results in a resource of personal knowledge. Evaluation in constructivist perspective examines the thinking process. As there are more than one ways of solving problem, each student’s approach is more important than a particular solution.

4. The Improvement of social communication