Supporting and scaffolding the teachers’ practices: contribution to the professional development through a digital device of peer coaching

• In Event: Teacher education programmes: lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Europe

Proposal

With the various reforms in teacher training, a number of new questions arise around the learning of the profession. Indeed, teacher training in France, as in other countries, is experiencing an important paradox underpinned by institutional and social injunctions. On the one hand, the pace and number, sometimes contradictory, of reforms (“masterisation”, recruitment role in the university career) (Fauré, Gardiès & Marcel, 2015) and on the other hand, high social expectations require strong adaptation (heterogeneity of audiences, complexity of teaching situations, need to be both innovative and efficient regarding student success, multiple assessments, student orientation issues, etc) while facing a very quick entry into the profession (Fauré, 2017). However, teaching situations remain highly complex (Doyle, 1986) and any new teacher has difficulties in both “didactizing” the contents to be taught (Gardiès & Venturini, 2015), managing both his time and the academic process while developing a feeling of relatively high professional effectiveness enabling him to cope with all situations (Marcel, 2005). Concurrently, the training provided still oscillates between a form of “universitarization” (Fauré, Gardiès & Marcel, 2016) and empirical learning based on the observation of an experienced teacher. Consequently, many questions emerge in the reflection of teacher trainers, whether in the choice of content to be taught, the support offered or the forms of professionalization targeted. The question of the professional development of teachers thus becomes, not only when they enter the profession but also throughout their careers, central in France. Indeed, if training is entrusted to post graduate education schools, the learning of professional skills and behavior remains important. This problem in teacher training is shared in different countries, but the solutions to deal with these paradoxes are sometimes different. Thus, if in Anglo-Saxon countries such as the USA or Canada, forms of coaching directly in situation have been developed in fields other than teacher training (BIE) (Rock & al, 2012, Scheeler, McKinnon & Stout, 2012), in France a system has been designed, tested and evaluated to support teachers in situation and in real time. The particularity of this system deployed in agricultural education is that it is implemented in situations of co-teaching. This cooperative learning strengthens the process of accompanying and supporting professional practices proposed in this system. This is based on a theoretical triptych articulating the approach of teaching practices (Bandura, 2003, Marcel, 2006), of professional knowledge (Tardif & Lessard, 1999) and finally of teachers' professional development. Based on this theoretical perspective, we propose to present the results and methodological perspectives of the implementation of a regulating system for teaching practices in real time and in real situations applied to agricultural education co-teaching. The data collected covers 6 teachers and 10 filmed pedagogical sessions. The results analysed show that this form of support is relevant for the professional development of teachers and their initial professional integration. Based on the results of this experiment and the joint analysis, we will consider the conditions for a larger scale deployment.

Authors

• Cécile GARDIES, ENSFEA France

• Laurent Fauré, ENSFEA France

• Jean-François MARCEL, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès