Effets d’un dispositif de formation exploitant des vidéos d’exemples de pratiques sur le développement d’une compétence professionnelle chez des enseignants du primaire

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a web-based professional teacher development application called “Zooming in on Teaching Expertise”. More precisely, our aim was to evaluate the effect of a training course entailing examples of practice on video and created within the application. In particular, the study focused on participating elementary school teachers’ learning and their intentions to modify their practice with respect to the professional competency: “To pilot teaching/learning situations”. The education reform that has been progressively introduced since 2001 has been changing the direction of teacher training considerably. Its success relies particularly on the acquisition of new professional competencies that are often difficult to develop for in-service teachers. However, the training methods in place at the start of the reform did not seem to be meeting this need as well as expected. The web-based application used in this research project was developed to support teachers embrace this pedagogical renewal by proposing new training strategies based primarily on the observation and analysis of filmed practices, along with a variety of tools aimed at stimulating reflection on the teaching practice itself. The application emerged along others with a similar nature. Yet, still today, little is known about their effectiveness on the professional development of teachers. To examine these questions, we developed a training course that was then undertaken by six teachers. These teachers also participated in two semi-structured interviews and shared notes taken during training. Grounded in an evaluation based theoretical framework, the following three research questions emerged and were pursued: First, in what ways did the model have an effect on the development of the teacher competency it was intended for? Second, what was its effect on teachers’ intentions to change their practice? And third, in what ways could the professional teacher development application be improved in better supporting teachers’ professional development? This framework was later used to guide the analysis and interpretation of the data collected. A substantial amount of data was collected, enabling us to document and increase our understanding of the role of this web-based video mediated application. This allowed us to confirm the positive effect of online video based professional teacher development applications. In particular, we observed that the teachers were able to define the components of the targeted competency more clearly. The participants confirmed having learned from the video examples and training and expressed the intention to bring change in their own practice. All teachers greatly appreciated the training course and its videos, particularly the opportunity to observe peers who struggled like them, and to explore ways of putting the knowledge into practice in their own classrooms. In addition, the participants’ comments and suggestions helped identify areas for improvement of the application, such as reducing the number of videos and competency elements presented, or increasing the complementary educational content accompanying the videos. These suggestions for improvement should however still be further explored and discussed, and may lead to new research questions and further follow-up studies.

Keyphrases: In-service Teacher Education, Professional Development, Multimedia, Information and Communication Technologies, Learning, Teaching, Modeling, Video Cases, Change of Practice, Professional Competency