During the period of 9 -11 February 2016, the Educational Center PRO DIDACTICA has organized the second training session on „Critical thinking for the professional skills development”. Participants, teachers – representatives from several vocational schools from the Republic of Moldova, focused this time on critical thinking strategies designed to promote cooperative learning, having in objective to form habits of teamwork.

This goal is valid both for students, which will work at the workplace in various contexts, and for teachers involved in the process. The training focused on addressing of some relevant topics: key aspects of cooperative learning, advantages and limitations of cooperative learning, stages to form a group, tasks for working in group, application of Bloom’s Taxonomy to define tasks, management of work in group etc.
Going beyond the demonstrative phase of work in teams – has been discussed the formation, management, evaluation of the process and joint work product, communication among participants.
Applying a final questionnaire, different from the usual evaluation for this kind of trainings, requested answers regarding the identification of some problems related to design, organization and evaluation of teamwork. Responses – various, but essentially correct – allow us to conclude that our trainees have analyzed and realized difficulties, risks of using teamwork techniques, alias cooperative learning. We hope that the information provided to trainees will get to their fellows at work and in classrooms.
We note the growing interest of participants for the issues raised and their impact on edifying a generation of young workers with the skills of critical thinking and teamwork sufficiently developed to ensure a successful professional insertion.

Rima BEZEDE ,
Project Coordinator