"I've really seen myself as a robot": professional development and perception of teachers involved in a collaborative setting after a second implementation loop
Résumé
This PhD research investigates the professional development of schoolteachers involved in a collaborative research with science and mathematics education researchers. For two years, this group has coconstructed a complete sequence of lessons on the attribute mass for pupils from 4 to 7 years old, based on a children's book. This paper presents the first results of this study. It appears that all the teachers have increased their abilities to identify the difficulties of their pupils and clarify their didactical objectives and issues. Nevertheless, as the sequence became more structured, they felt a sort of a discomfort in their teaching practices and found their pupils less motivated by the lesson than the first years. This observation leads us to discuss the balance between the collective development of a structured, detailed common scenario and the latitude left to the teachers in their implementation.
Attribute and measurement, collaborative research, teachers' professional development, elementary school, concept of mass.
At the interface between mathematics and physics, "attributes and measurement" is an essential domain in sciences. In the French curricula for elementary school, "attributes and measurement" is one of the four main themes of mathematics teaching. These two concepts also appear in the kindergarten's curricula in the area entitled "Exploring shapes, magnitudes and organized sequences". A progression is recommended to enhance the attribute's conceptualization: the discovery of a specific attribute begins with direct perception, followed by activities involving direct and indirect comparisons. Its measurement is then introduced, initially with arbitrary units and then with the usual units. In the line of Piaget studies, many research point out the relevance of this progression for the cognitive development of children (e.g. Sarama et al., 2011).
However, many schoolteachers face difficulties to follow this progression (Munier & Passelaigue, 2012). When they follow it, they often do so only for the length and very little for other attributes (mass, volume, duration, angle, etc.), which may be explained by the difficulties they have in distinguishing attributes from measurement (Passelaigue & Munier, 2015). One question seems essential: how to enhance the schoolteacher's knowledge and practices concerning the teaching of attributes and measurement and foster their professional development on this specific domain? Various studies show that collaborative settings can enhance the improvement of didactical knowledge of teachers (e.g. Chanudet & Favier, 2023) and, more generally, the professional development of teachers (e.g. Bednarz, 2013). Moreover, our previous research (Antoine et al., 2023) shows that it is possible to foster pupils' learning thanks to children's books in which attribute
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