teaching methods and innovation, critical thinking, reading and comprehension of texts, school and leisure reading

Increasing the understanding of written information for everyday and professional life is one of the goals of the current Czech education system and lifelong learning in the 21st century influenced by society 4.0, processes of robotisation, automation, and digitalisation in all areas of application on the labour market. PISA research (2009, 2018) pointed to the long-term average of a lower level of reading literacy among fifteen-year-old Czech pupils, especially boys. The aim of the quantitative questionnaire research carried out at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ostrava as part of a student grant project (2023) was to find out what strategies and teaching methods are understood by the research sample of 425 pupils of secondary technical schools as effective, innovative tools that develop reading, critical thinking and understanding of various kinds of texts. The sub-goal of the 2nd phase of qualitative research using the interview method with 18 pupils (aged 15-17) from 3 technical secondary schools in the Moravian-Silesian Region in the Czech Republic was to find out how pupils navigate school reading lists, what types of texts they read in their free time most often and for what purpose, what factors do pupils consider helpful in understanding written information, what teaching methods support critical thinking when reading diverse texts. From the selected results of the qualitative research, it is clear that pupils consider the brainstorming teaching method to be popular in engineering subjects, as it is a helpful procedure for finding relationships between the discussed and read information (e.g., "it helps me find the relationship of superiority/inferiority between information", "I think about words, what belongs to what"). Pupils consider the method of critical thinking "Cinquain" to be a five-line "shortcut", a "path", helping to understand information from the point of view of its pros and cons, e.g., in the case of "machinery". Pupils see th