Engaging students, teachers, and professionals with 21st century skills: the ‘Critical Thinking Day’ proposal as an integrated model for engineering educational activities

The 21st century challenges claim for a shift in engineering education to a broader socio-cultural understanding of the engineer’s role and responsibility in society, putting Critical Thinking (CT), teamwork and oral communication skills into the forefront. This paper proposes an innovative integrated model to design and deliver high-quality CT educational activities, based both on the use of the CRITHINKEDU educational protocol and the Paul-Elder CT framework, altogether with the combination of different active learning strategies, such as structured questioning, problem-based learning, role play, and cooperative learning. The model was tested during the ‘Critical Thinking Day’ workshop, which brought together 8 labor market professionals, 150 students and 25 teachers from different disciplinary fields and educational levels to critically solve real-world problem situations. The results of the post-questionnaire on participants’ perceptions showed that the experience impacted them positively, indicating great potential for its replication in the engineering educational context. Although future research is needed to validate the model, the study herein presented is the first attempt towards this achievement.