Contemporary Pedagogical Approaches for Developing Higher Level Thinking on Science Classes

The school is the mirror of a society. To create and develop good education means to realize objectives that would reflect its sense. In current education, the hierarchy of values that should be set and implemented is asymmetrically positioned. In successful school, the student should become the meaning and the purpose of the content that will introduce him/her into the world of competition and competence in order to enable successful communication with it. How can a teaching lesson become a workshop in which new ideas, creative solutions, new forms of research and new knowledge are being undercrossed?! The research that has been done in this paper aims to investigate the introduction of practical teaching and application of reforms in teaching biology in the six primary urban schools in Stip, R. Macedonia. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews made with 11 experienced teachers of biology and were analyzed their class planes. The results showed that teachers occasionally introduced a small number of enhanced instructional strategies that explicitly match the formal curriculum in their classes, such as: presenting, analyzing and generalizing experimental results from practical teaching of biology in various forms. However, teachers have used fewer strategies that target encouraging higher level thinking, such as to induce students to ask questions or to learn about problem solving strategies used during lessons. Differences were identified between teachers regarding the use of rich teaching strategies during lessons, and their beliefs about the abilities of students to develop the ability to think at a higher level