Table of contents

The text

The author

The credits

Dominique Gillet

Partnerships and young people

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School teachers are far from being the only educators for children in schools today. Resources, partners, outside educators – all have become commonplace. Beyond the notion of official texts and necessary conventions in order to establish a particular framework, what is the situation of partnerships? How does the work of different people get organized? What is the place and role of each partner? To what end?

Partners are authorized and allowed by official texts to work in order to ‘bring a valuable contribution to compulsory teaching practices’[1].

‘To bring a valuable contribution’ is to help to fulfill something. In school, it means helping to carry out an action in line with the framework provided by the school project. In other words, it means cooperating with the teacher in order to contribute to the learning processes of all students in any specific field. The word ‘cooperating’ has to be distinguished from ‘collaborating.’ Indeed, cooperation implies an adjustment of the activities where there is a shared purpose; whereas collaboration requires communication as well, but can be satisfied with the sharing of the workspace and periods of learning in the process of a joint action. Beyond the notion of a partnership that is offered and accepted within a particular teaching situation and which sometimes involves delegating to an albeit competent outside educator, a partnership whose basis is founded upon a shared teaching aim, involving the teacher as much as the outside educator, may then be considered as a resource in order to provide students with an original setting for learning. In practice, the actual relationships between teacher and educator are quite diverse. It remains difficult for each party to enter each other’s world even if, on the surface, it might be possible. Partnership action, often established contractually and thus ‘authorized’ is sometimes perceived as a right, a duty, a necessity that can become a habit. Each party does its job according to respective values and expectations. This aspect is what should be shared in the first instance, before asking ‘who does what, how, when, to what end?’ The role of each partner depends on their specific skills and determines his or her position in the working space (standing apart, next to the students, facing the students…) and in time (when will the vocabulary of the song be taught? By whom?…). The one observing will not place his or herself in the same space as he or she who is leading or co-leading the class. Observing should be encouraged for teachers, educators and even children. However, what is observed needs to be defined while allowing there to be openness to the unexpected.

Such contribution deals with the ‘compulsory teaching activities’, meaning activities that are coherent with the curriculum of the ongoing year for the students. If we can celebrate the fact that they take them beyond certain learning outcomes, it should be ensured that this is not done at the expense of other fundamental aims.

The teacher and the educator are partners if ‘while maintaining their autonomy, they accept to pool their efforts in order to reach a common goal linked to a problem or an identified need in which, given their respective mission, they can find an interest, a responsibility, a motivation or even a requirement’[2].

The essential cooperation between educators should be as essential with students. Slavin[3] recommends that ‘learners should be completely aware of the pursued collective goals and their individual responsibility.’ In order for students to all learn a set of knowledge and skills aimed at by partnership action, it is necessary to take some time to identify their needs, to set up some form of differentiation and to make the most of being two people to support each other towards these goals. It is crucial to clarify what is expected not only in terms of validation (for example when producing a show) but also in terms of learning. It is important to distinguish between moments of validation and assessment. The latter are essential in enabling children to become aware of their progress, of what they have learned. Without this awareness, the mobilization of knowledge (content or approaches) in another time, another context will remain difficult if not impossible.

To assist children is to guide them towards targeted acquisitions. This is perfectly compatible with a period of practice, such as repeating a sequence of sounds in music, of dancing gestures, of words in literature…

Assisting children is above all else to help them to be autonomous. It is not enough to repeatedly tell them what to do or ask a question to which only one student can answer. Beyond transmission and imitation, practicing to use what has been memorized is essential. It can be done when children are placed in complex situations asking for their reliance on knowledge and processes they have previously acquired.

Step by step guidance often leads to the success of an activity. However, it should be encouraged again during another activity in the hope of reaching success once again. For some children, step-by-step guidance is enough because they are able to identify by themselves knowledge needed and transfer it in another context. But other students just go with the flow, do what they have been asked to, have no distance; and what they remember from the activity is just the activity itself. They can say they did a show, they danced, they sang… but nothing more is retained. That is why, in order to develop high-level competences, real proficiency, it is necessary to provide situations where it is not enough to just redo what has been practiced over a long period of time (skills).

Projects can develop competences; but only if it is targeted and recognized by students as authorized and expected of them. ‘The capacity to act implies the ability to invest acquired knowledge into action but also to abstract from the action knowledge that will be reinvested in other contexts’[4]. ‘The competent student is capable of solving new and complex tasks requiring choosing and combining learned processes’[5]. Knowledge is nothing without the skills and thought patterns that mobilize it in concrete situations.

Students must learn how to reason, communicate, argue, make choices… Yet learning to reason cannot be learned by answering closed questions or imitating the gestures of an adult. ‘Reasoning is more about creating interactions’[6], creating a link between objects of perception and objects of memory, developing a thought process able to overcome the challenge of complex situations and organizations. From elementary school, such thought processes are to be conceived as a means to act, handle of data, constraints, evolutions… Reasoning is more about questioning and looking for internal and external resources in order to find an answer. It means becoming cultivated, having the means to remember, reconstruct, generalize or adjust knowledge in different situations.

But how do we guide children towards such skills?

‘If I want to succeed in helping a student to reach a specific goal, I must identify where he is at and start there, precisely there… I definitely should know more than he does, but first I must understand what he understands. If I can’t, being more capable and more learned than him is meaningless’[7].

Transmitting knowledge often appears sufficient. This only requires knowledge; whereas assisting the development of competences requires didactic and educational skills. In the words of Britt-Mari Barth, for children to learn they must be researchers and therefore educators must play the role of ‘intermediary.’[8]

The building of competences means learning situations and regulating them according to prior learning. The mere fact that there is a project, a valorization planned for an action certainly offers something that can motivate people’s minds, but does not guarantee the development of the skills that are targeted by adults.

Generally, students do not know what is expected of them when the teacher or his or her partners set the goal. In fact, the explanation is often reduced to what the students will have to ‘do’, or rehearse. The preparation for a show for example can be a motivation leading to the development of technical skills, cooperation, planning and the management of constraints. Aren’t all these learning processes often taken care of by the adults (teacher and educator)? The focus of everyone, often completely centered on the final production, tends to leave the learning processes to the side. It creates confusion between the moments of validation and assessment that must be a part of any real project. It is essential to move away from a mode of assessment that only includes indicators of satisfaction such as ‘the show happened, parents applauded, children were happy…’. It is crucial to define indicators that will highlight what each participant has acquired in the implementation of the project.

What can be assessed:

- * The pertinence of the project with an analysis of the relationship between the end product and the goals, meaning the context in which the project has been programmed and implemented, the needs of the children involved, and the expectations of the teacher. It is necessary to examine the values, goals, stages, and roles of each participant, decided upon during the discussion that preceded the project to question and assess their quality;

- * The coherence of the resources, contents and methods used, the competence of the educators, the involvement of students;

- * The effectiveness of the action with a comparison of the results and what was expected;

- * The efficiency with an analysis of the link between the means employed (time, material and human resources) and the results;

- * The acquisition of knowledge and know-how, the mobilization of feelings: what knowledge and skills are instilled in each student? In terms of content, the strategies for using resources, developing creativity, critical thinking…? How is this assessment shared with the students? What level of awareness have they each reached during the whole process of the project?

All these questions are fundamental when analyzing the action in partnership in a meaningful way, which in turn furthers other involvements in a shared approach that is more and more appropriate, coherent, efficient and effective. This is at the heart of what a partnership should bring.

The precise identification of what we assess, of the level at which we operate accounts for the mastery of the situation by the partners. It demonstrates that action is merely a pretext, an adapted solution for the development of competences.

The complementarity of roles is a valuable resource that should be exploited and highlighted in order to prove that having two adults is not just a matter of comfort or luxury but a necessity at the service of each student.

Translation: Paul Warusfel

1 __ Organisation de la contribution des intervenants extérieurs à l’éducation nationale dans les écoles du premier degré. [Organisation of outside educators in the first cycle of education] Eduscol, 2014

2 __ Collective work under the direction of Yves Barreyre, Dictionnaire critique de l’action critique, Fayard, Paris, 1995

3 __ Slavin Robert, L’apprentissage coopératif : pourquoi ça marche ? [Cooperative learning: why does it work?] in CERI (dir.) Comment apprend-on ? La recherche au service de la pratique [How do we learn? Research into the practicalities], OCDE, Paris, 2010. Pages 171-189

4 __ Rey Olivier, De la transmission des savoirs à l’approche par compétences [From the tranmission of knowledge to a skills-based approach], Dossier d’actualité VST-INRP, n°34, Lyon, April 2008

5 __ Garette Vincent, quoted by Olivier Rey, Le défi de l’évaluation des compétences, Dossier d’actualité, Veille et analyse, n°76, IFE, Lyon, June 2012

6 __ Giordano André, Apprendre à raisonner… oui, mais sur quoi ? [learning to reason… yes, but about what?], Cahiers pédagogiques, n°344-345, May-June 1996

7 __ Kierkegaard Soren, quoted by Barth Britt-Mari, Le savoir en construction [Constructing knowledge], Retz, Paris, 1993, p. 175

8 __ Barth Britt-Mari, Élève chercheur, enseignant médiateur [Student as researcher and the intermediary teacher], Retz, Paris, 2013

/…

The author

During her career, Dominique Gillet has held many positions enabling her to approach the conditions for the success of children from many different perspectives. Research into cognitive psychology and educational studies, teaching at the university, but also in a training center for adults and in primary schools, her status as an academic advisor in Isère and later as an academic inspector for the Ministry of Education in the department of the Rhone have been the many occasions for her to question failure and success, looking particularly into solutions in order to bring about success for students and means for teachers to make their students succeed. Dominique Gillet was soon convinced that in the cultural and scientific fields, partnership is one of the resources to be exploited. For twenty years, she has been interested in the conditions which lead to the pertinence, coherence, efficiency and effectiveness of a partnership, in particular when implementing an action, to the place of each participant: teacher, educator without forgetting the pupils themselves.

Partnerships and young people
Dominique Gillet

Éclair #8

Collection of the Centre de Formation de Musiciens Intervenant à l’école de l’Université Lumière Lyon 2, CFMI de Lyon

Resources center in artistic and cultural education cfmi@univ-lyon2.fr – www.cfmi-lyon.fr

ISBN: 978-2-490238-23-1

ISSN: 2270-7263

Free

Editorial organization: Amandine Monnet and Marion Orlandi

Translation: Paul Warusfel

Graphic design: Pascale Péronnet ij design

© CFMi, lyon, 2018

© CFMi, lyon, 2015 for the original draft in French

Copyrights reserved in all countries

Legal submission 4th trimester 2015 for the original draft in French

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Digital version: https://edition-cfmi.univ-lyon2.fr

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