3 – THE NEEDS OF THE TEACHING TEAMS

Marc Loison (2005) draws his conclusions from several studies with large sample populations, his own and others, by analysing the success contracts drawn up by the teaching and support teams developed with head teachers and network coordinators, both old and new (p. 252). Several points emerge from this which support the assessments of the rebound programmes by the two Chief Inspectors of Schools (Dusseau, Isambert, 2003).

- Firstly, the need for most of the teaching teams to set up a “network board” to manage and assess the project, in other words, for staff involved in the “local realities to take collective decisions.” In effect, a network board would include the head of the collège (State secondary school), the IEN, (Inspecteur de l’Education nationale/ Primary School Inspector), the coordinator, education advisors (from the IEN), heads of nursery and primary schools and secondary school teachers.

This desire, expressed by the majority of representatives in the teaching teams, indicates what Agnès Henriot van Zanten (1999) called “the normative passage from control to making the various actors more responsible.” Marc Loison noted that if the network board appears as an excellent management tool rather than a consulting tool in the circles composed of decision-makers at hierarchical level, he believes it is because they associate school heads and teachers with reflection and decision-making. There is more likelihood of avoiding the often noted weakness of blaming others, in other words every contributor to the system and at every level, for the failure of pupils.

- This leads to the need for didactic and pedagogic training that focuses above all on language learning, remediation measures, pedagogical differentiation and new communication technologies. Teachers appear to be aware of their own weaknesses with respect to helping pupils overcome theirs, in cognitive as much as in socialisation terms.

Members of the ESCOL research team in Paris 8 have specialised in this type of problem, either alone or in association with others, linking the pupils’ “register of learning and the relationship with school knowledge” with “practices in institutions and

by teachers in the way they deal with specifically school-based difficulties” (cf. Bautier, Terrail, 2003, p. 22).

Their studies highlight the fact that the best-meaning primary school teachers are lost when they find themselves in classes in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They tend to focus on games and socialisation activities in order to foster a learning context in a population which is unprepared by the culture of its family of origin. To put themselves at the level of pupils who are unfamiliar with the school culture, they multiply references to daily life, focus on project-based learning without it leading to decontextualized knowledge relating to the children’s experience, use language learning as a means of expression, leaving aside its explanatory and argumentation functions, congratulate their pupils on their efforts and give grades for mediocre results so as not to discourage them. They rectify errors by giving the right solution without making the learner search for it for themselves.

In primary as in secondary schools, “teachers work in accordance with obvious learning ‘prerequisites’ that are supposedly shared by all, and are not therefore specifically developed in their classes, and when they admit that their pupils do not have these “prerequisites”, the learning content is adapted to the supposed characteristics of the population they are dealing with. This adaptation should allow the pupils to feel empowered regarding the work they have to do, so that they can do it without being aware that there is a gap between what they ‘do’ and what is expected of them. (Bautier, Terrail, 2003, p. 25). Thus, pupils in difficulty manage to find factual information in a text or do an exercise following instructions, but do not manage to make the transition to meta-cognition involving more complex activities.

While teaching approaches in schools foster “cognitive misunderstandings” in pupils in difficulty, the mistake of not putting pupils in a situation to help them develop complex and non mechanical learning runs through the whole school system. The poor results of French pupils in general, and in such domains as written comprehension in particular, for example, are highlighted in international studies like the PISA programme or those conducted in the framework of the OECD (cf. 1-2 Results of French pupils compared to European pupils).

This implies that much greater effort should be put into developing teacher training programmes.

According to the assessment methods used by Marc Loison, the interest of introducing a programme like the success contract programme is that it is based on putting the teachers in a network situation, with structures, a network board, and team meetings in which the force of the hierarchy is replaced by the search for common solutions. This is characteristic of support measures designed for schools and teaching staff in

socio-economically deprived areas. We find it again in the assessment that Gilles Ferréol (2005, 2006) made of the “Lycée de toutes les chances” (Secondary schools with a good chance) experiment. As they feel comfortable, the teachers discuss their problems more openly, enabling them to express the training needs that correspond to their problems, and taking their analysis further with the help of colleagues who have made more progress in the area. This puts them in a “sharing practices” situation, promoting greater access to even complex education programmes. Studies by the academics and researchers from the INRP show that pupils’ national assessment results are thus taken into consideration.

From the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the success contracts and the placement reports from the 36 REPs in the “department ”, Marc Loison identified the following priorities with respect to initiatives developed with and for teachers :

Heading the list, “language skill remains a major challenge for the REPs, and the measures introduced mainly address behaviour, tools, situations and reading and writing supports as well as supports for the production of writing. Generally, these teaching and learning measures attempt to address the difficulties identified via the national CE2 (3rd _{year of primary school) and 1}st _{year in collège (secondary school)} assessments. They concern respectively difficulties linked to knowledge and mastering codes, lexical knowledge and understanding instructions; the poor use of standard tools and a minimalist attitude to work; the absence of reading and writing situations in some families and language lacuna.”

The following priority concerns support measures for pupils in difficulty, notably by “drawing up a contract (tailored project) between the teaching team, the pupil and the parents; exchange of teaching practices; conducting meetings to regulate and standardise between all the actors (teachers, teaching assistants, specific and specialised staff). The third priority involving making sense of learning and developing the pupils’ methodological behaviour, is mainly based on the inability of some pupils to organise their work and, despite their passiveness, to construct knowledge in the absence of motivation for writing and despite the difficulty to transfer learning.”

Continuity between learning and teaching and intra- and inter liaisons as well as primary schools and

collège (liaisons constitute the next priorities (…). The measures proposed focus, among other things, on

the correction of assessments in learning stage teams, the coherence of class projects with school stages and the school, and the harmonisation of the disciplinary nomenclature” (p. 260-261).

The concern that pupils have “obvious difficulty” in making sense of their learning but, above all, of transferring their knowledge and know-how, has led to measures which “mainly consist of making all the disciplines involving reading-writing coherent, using diverse teaching supports and targeting reading (read to write and communicate).” (p. 261-262).

It is interesting that the needs expressed by the interested parties themselves, namely the teachers, match the weaknesses in their practice highlighted by researchers. Marc Loison’s analysis highlights the fact that during board meetings, programme meetings or teachers’ staff meetings, the interested parties themselves reach very similar

conclusions to those of the researchers in the analysis of teaching practices and their effects in REPs (education action networks).

The training schemes also continue to meet these needs and we find what we considered the key characteristic : a collective and ‘sharing’ form of functioning. In all the meetings, the teachers “demonstrate the determination or the ability to provide solutions to the problems they come across in their daily classroom practice, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and training preparation” (p. 262). They do not stop at the empirical analysis of the process, however, but move on to a stage of meta-learning with respect to the problems. This is facilitated by the fact that the teachers concerned are put in a research framework situation. In effect, the staff development programme took place in stages that lasted two to four days, introduced by the INRP and applying to 20 of the 24 schools concerned. (p. 263)

The results were then assessed from responses to a questionnaire using open questions, administered before and after the training programmes, in 20 out of the 24 schools in the département.

4 – RESEARCH RESULTS