Having textbooks adapted to differentiation is the first key to allow teachers to change posture and support their class in a differentiated way. It is not active pedagogy as usually presented. From our experience of accompanying schools, we know that an ordinary school with simultaneous teaching wants to keep an “ordinary school” character and is not ready to make the students work most of the time in groups on transdisciplinary projects, which we do not offer. The two crucial factors in transforming an ordinary school are: - support the teacher's posture change in class (coaching), - offer ready-to-use course material allowing autonomy and differentiation. Point 1, teacher training and transformation process, was successfully addressed in the Erasmus + SchoolTransformationLab.eu project which ends in August 2020 with other partners. Point 2 is the “exercises” part of the course material, ie school booklets for students. This is what we propose to create and make available to the greatest number via this Erasmus project and will concern the main subjects of students from 8 to 14 years old: French, mathematics, science, geography and history. This proposal excites all the teachers we support. Except ... there is no ready-to-use textbook to work in this way, which slows down the transformation of schools and the implementation of differentiated pedagogies. Therefore, the partnership composed of a school and a center for educational innovation (Ecole du Dialogue), a university (Université Paul-Valéry de Montpellier), a training association (Allagi) and the aim of a platform for teachers (Teaching.be) is to develop ready-to-use exercise material allowing the change of posture of the teacher in the class and adaptation to the level and needs of all students.
We wanted to provide teachers with ready-to-use workbooks to facilitate their posture change. Most teachers have only worked in a traditional/frontal/simultaneous manner and have great difficulty training in a coach posture. If they also have to create the necessary course materials, this becomes an insurmountable barrier. This is our observation from the 2017 Erasmus+ project “SchoolTransformationLab” on changing posture. With another posture, differences in level in classes become an asset rather than a handicap, since mutual assistance is facilitated. With another posture, one of the main problems of our school system (heterogeneity) becomes a force while currently it is fought through segregation, repetition, remediation and relegation because the traditional teacher needs a homogeneous class ready to receive chapter 8 which they will collectively explain for 50 minutes. The objective of this project is to provide a free educational tool to facilitate the change of posture necessary to embrace the heterogeneity of classes.
Pupils in most classes have very different levels. This makes the traditional approach difficult where the teacher gives long collective explanations and the same exercises to all these pupils. The need to differentiate between levels is heavyt, but the vast majority of teachers do not know how to do it. The number 1 principle for differentiating is to take each student at their real level, not their “administrative” level. A 12 year old student who doesn't see why 1/2 = 2/4 has to color pies like an 8 year old pupil would. But the teacher does not have time to find him a textbook for an 8-year-old child and the student would not be very motivated by a textbook for “babies”. Many subjects have prerequisites that must be automated. For example, the conjugation and agreement of the past participle in French are assimilated over several years. This integration of the basic building blocks requires doing thousands of exercises of increasing difficulty. Only then will the student's cognition be freed for the more complex topics based on these assimilated bricks.