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Abstract
This paper presents an exploratory study of two consecutive reading sessions conducted in primary school by two different teachers. Our purpose is twofold. From a theoretical viewpoint, we propose a tentative set of conditions of teaching effectiveness by relying on the Joint Action Theory in Didactics. From a methodological viewpoint, drawing on a conjectural paradigm, we attempt to articulate various types of analysis (didactic analyses, speech analyses, statistic analyses), in order to test the putative conditions. We consider two generic factors in teachers’ effectiveness: how they manage to expose students to the core meanings of the relevant content; and how they maintain a relevant dialectic between uncertainty and certainty in the argumentation process in order to increase the deliberative quality of the constructed certainty.
Notes
1. The first year of primary education in France when students are six years old.
2. Conducted in response to the call for a national project as part of the Programme Incitatif de Recherche en Education et Formation (PIREF = Programme for the Promotion of Education and Training Research), entitled ‘The social contexts of learning’.
3. The whole set of data on which we based the present article was completed only for the two teachers whose teaching practices are studied here. This is the reason why the three other teachers’ teaching practices are not taken into account in the present paper, even though the observation of their practices contributed to the elaboration of the conditions of teaching effectiveness which we present below.
4. This goal stems from a theoretical position close to that of Klafki: ‘teaching and learning must be understood as processes of interaction, i.e., as processes in which relationships between people—between teachers and learners and between the learners themselves—play a central role. These processes must therefore be comprehended not only as processes of acquisition in which subject matter and problems are confronted, but also as social processes or processes of social learning’ (Klafki, Citation2000, p. 142).
5. The students were in their first year of formal reading teaching, but the teachers found they were able to perform individual reading of some texts at that time. Individual reading does not, however, mean accurate and complete reading. The students had to explore the text in order to recognize the reading units they were familiar with or were able to decipher.
6. This mathematical interlude was the teacher’s responsibility. It refers to a class tradition, which we have seen regularly in our observation of this teacher’s practice.
7. In the following, the symbol + means a short pause, the symbol ++ a longer pause, the symbol <…?> an inaudible utterance.
8. ‘Turn’ refers to the speaker's turn in the dialogue.
9. This suggestion is also supported by the study of the seven sessions produced by this teacher during the two years of the study.
10. One can argue that it is difficult to differentiate in such an evaluation between the fruits of comprehension abilities and writing competence, but it must be remembered that these comprehension questions were the teacher’s choice and not the research team’s.
11. Sphinx Lexica software.
12. We have chosen to present this analysis in tabular form for reasons of clarity.
13. The pairwise correlation level between the scores produced by each of the assessors was significant and above 0.6 in all cases, except for question 9 (see previous section).
14. In this section, we use the results of work undertaken by Céline Piquée as part of the PIREF research project (Piquee, Citation2007) and we should like to thank her here.
15. The genre repetition was not different between the two classes, for Year 1 as well Year 2.
16. It should be noted that for these two teachers, the order of progress in mathematics was reversed, with T1's students making more progress than T2's.
17. In an ongoing research, we designed an experiment in which teachers’ practice was characterized through a systematic fine-grain analysis of a subset of a long teaching sequence that we systematically compared with a large-grain analysis of the whole of this teaching sequence.
18. One may acknowledge the deep commonalities of such a conception with the viewpoint provided from the didactic transposition theory (Chevallard, Citation2007; Chevallard & Sensevy, Citationin press.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gérard Sensevy
Gérard Sensevy is a professor of Educational Sciences in the Brittany Institute of Education, University of Western Brittany, 153, rue Saint-Malo, Rennes 35520, France; e-mail: [email protected]. The main focus of his research consists of studying teaching and learning processes, and their relationship. In his current work, he develops a Joint Action Theory in Didactics, in which he notably tries to link Didactics to other disciplines in Social Sciences (Cognitive Sciences, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Linguistics and History). He is the co-editor of the Journal Education & Didactique and co-director of the Series Paideia (Presses Universitaires de Rennes). http://cread.espe-bretagne.fr/spip.php?article521.