From Willingness to Practice: A Person-Centered Study of Primary Teachers’ Critical-Thinking Readiness and the Enactment Gap

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Critical thinking (CT) is a core competence that schools are expected to cultivate, yet whether it reaches classrooms depends on teachers’ readiness to teach it. Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, we surveyed 312 primary English-as-a-foreign-language teachers in Shandong Province, China, across seven dimensions of readiness and interviewed five teachers. Latent profile analysis identified four profiles organized by two weakly related dimensions—the capacity teachers bring to CT teaching and the constraints they perceive around them: Empowered-Engaged (15%), Willing-but-Constrained (28%), Moderate-Unobstructed (20%), and Committed-but-Under-resourced (37%). Endorsement of CT was near-universal, so the profiles differed in capacity and circumstance rather than in commitment. The central finding is a disconnection between what teachers believe and what they report doing: Willing-but-Constrained teachers wanted further professional learning as much as their Empowered-Engaged peers did, yet reported teaching CT less often. The divergence held under methods that account for classification uncertainty and under alternative measurement specifications, though not under all of them, and profile membership was largely unrelated to teachers’ background characteristics. The interview findings help explain why positive beliefs about CT did not always correspond to classroom practice. Teachers reported limited CT-specific training, examination pressure, time constraints, and norms that discouraged questioning, despite generally recognizing the value of CT. This suggests that the main barriers to CT instruction may lie not in teachers’ attitudes toward CT, but in their opportunities, preparation, and working conditions for implementing it.