This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The aim of the research was to develop and implement a teachers training master degree program with active integration of soft skills at all the stages to form students’ system and critical thinking, project management skills, teamwork and leadership, communication and cross-cultural interaction skills. To solve these problems, the program included specialized practice-orientated courses based on the principles of pedagogical ergonomics and the latest technologies (ball-rating system, workshop, case study, “agile” principle, pedagogical situations’ modeling and others). The research resulted is a unique, effective and validated program and a set of training materials to develop universal competencies of master degree students.

The article is devoted to students critical thinking skills’ development. Basing on the experiment, the author formulates a definition of the "critical thinking" concept and graphically presents its semantic composition. The article examines the invariant features of critical thinking and highlights the main strategies for its formation. They include: selecting and filtering information for the tasks set, evaluating information as "true" or "false", evaluating information as "implicit" or "explicit", identifying implicit manipulation strategies, systematizing the information selected according to established criteria, indicating correct relations between the facts highlighted, performing students’ own creative product of thought, reflection and the ability to argue their position. The author comes to the conclusion that these strategies should be taken into account when planning educational tasks with students of different ages.