AN INVESTIGATION OF ENGLISH TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDING ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS (HOTS) IN SMAN 3 KERINCI ACADEMIC YEAR 2022/2023

In the 21st century, Indonesia has implemented the 2013 curriculum. This is implemented to facilitate Indonesian people to be productive, creative, innovative, and effective through integrated attitude, skills, and knowledge emphasis. Higher-order thinking skills are emphasized in their use during the 2013 curriculum. For this reason, the important role of the teacher is in the successful implementation of hots in the learning process. This study aims to find out how English teachers understand and implemented higher-order thinking skills. This research employs a descriptive qualitative approach. The study was conducted on 5 English teachers at SMAN 3 Kerinci. Data collection used checklist observations and structured interviews and data analysis used theory from Braun and Clarke (2006). From the results of the research, the researcher found that all participants had a fairly good understanding of higher-order thinking skills, where each participant gave his opinion regarding the sub-skills of bloom's taxonomy. Almost all of the participants also claimed that they had applied higher-order thinking skills in learning English. However, it cannot be said that the application of higher-order thinking skills is going well due to several problems and constraints namely the low students' ability in English, the lack of competencies to design HOTS learning material, the limited time in implementing HOTS, and the lack of facilities to support the implementation of HOTS.