Innovation for the Classroom

Blogging about innovation in education is one thing, putting those ideas into practice with students is another. Since the beginning of the new school year in September 2013, we have been trying to bring about this transformation in the classes under my responsibility in Lycée Pierre and Marie Curie in Châteauroux (France).

The classes of "Terminale" (12^th grade) began their work with the TED video "Changing Educational Paradigms" by Sir Ken Robinson. Their first task: brainstorming about the question "How do we learn things at school?" It comes as no surprise that their list is quite conservative, except for the last item: "By being self-motivated".

Confronted with Robinson's arguments, they began digging deeper. After first identifying his arguments, they quickly moved on to explaining, analyzing and criticizing them, with the goal of making them their own. Sometimes they run off the rails, criticizing the very ideas Robinson himself is opposed to while under the impressing that they are taking Robinson to task. Little by little, however, they have managed to integrate Robinson's arguments into their own logical constructions, adding here and there elements of their own.

Continuing with this theme of innovation, we watched another TED video, WilliamKamkwamba's "How I harnessed the wind." Students were so impressed by Kamkwamba's accomplishments that they spent the following class hour discussing how striking his work is. This young Malawian built a windmill with parts from a scrapyard, with no formal education beyond primary level, no knowledge of English and just the few bits of information he could glean from physics and electricity books he read at a local library – written only in English. On the test two weeks later, I asked them to what extent Kamkwamba was a sort of hero. Approval was nearly unanimous.

However, showing videos in class and talking about them together is hardly an innovative teaching practice in and of itself. But we have begun to cross this bridge. Students thinking about their own conditions of learning is an important first step. They have begun looking for answers and ideas beyond teacher-centered lectures and target-language documents studied in class. The next step is to go on the web and watch other videos they choose themselves, searching for new ideas on their own and beginning to build a personal self-motivated learning process designed to supply answers to their own questions. They will explore the "Pearl Trees" diagram that we built together and exchange their ideas with distant partners using Skydrive and the Office Webapps as an exchange platform.  Tools like Mindmeister, Audacity, MS Photostory, Blogspot, Smart Notebook and Smart Ideas will also be used. Although this project has only begun, its innovative side will come to fruition in the work they realize in coming weeks.

Finally, I should note that this project is also intended to serve as an example of "best practices" to showcase ways of integrating educational technology into the classroom, as well as encouraging students to "think outside the box" and take charge of their own learning. I hope that the Barcelona Partners in Learning event will give me more opportunities for networking and finding distance communication project partners.

Innovation pour la salle de classe

Blogger sur l'innovation dans l'éducation est une chose, mettre en pratique ces idées avec les élèves en est une autre. Depuis la rentrée, début septembre 2013, nous essayons d'effectuer cette mise en pratique dans les classes dont j'ai la charge au Lycée Pierre et Marie Curie à Châteauroux.

Les classes de Terminale ont commencé le travail avec la vidéo "Changing Educational Paradigms" de Sir Ken Robinson sur TED. Les élèves ont d'abord fait un "brainstorming" sur la question "Comment apprenons-nous des choses à l'école?" Sans surprise, leur liste était extrêmement "classique",  à part le dernier point, "By being self-motivated".

Confrontés aux arguments de Robinson, ils ont commencé à enrichir leur réflexion. De l'étape d'identification des arguments, ils sont rapidement passés à la pensée critique, en les expliquant, en les analysant et en les critiquant, dans le but de se les approprier. Parfois, ils se trompent de cible en critiquant les mêmes idées que celles critiquées par Robinson, alors qu'ils pensent s'attaquer aux thèses de ce dernier. Mais la plupart du temps ils intègrent les arguments de Robinson dans leur propre argumentation, en apportant de nouveaux éléments.

En poursuivant le thème de l'innovation, nous avons regardé ensemble une autre vidéo sur TED, William Kamkwamba's "How I harnessed the wind". Les élèves ont été tellement impressionnés par le génie de Kamkwamba qu'ils en ont parlé pendant toute l'heure suivante. En effet, ce jeune homme de Malawi a construit une éolienne à partir de pièces récupérées dans une décharge, sans formation scolaire au-delà du niveau primaire, sans parler anglais mais néanmoins, avec les quelques informations glanées dans des livres de physique et d'électricité (écrits en anglais), il a réussi cet exploit.  Lors du contrôle, deux semaines plus tard, je leur ai demandé dans quelle mesure Kamkwamba était une sorte de héros: l'acclamation était presque unanime.

Certes, montrer des vidéos en classe pour animer des discussions n'est pas une démarche innovante en soi. Mais nous avons commencé à emprunter ce chemin. Les élèves réfléchissent aux conditions de leurs acquisitions et  se mettent au centre de leurs apprentissages en devenant acteurs et concepteurs. Ils commencent à chercher des réponses au-delà des cours magistraux et aux contenus abordés en classe. L'étape suivante, c'est d'aller plus loin sur le web, visionner d'autres vidéos. Rechercher d'autres informations dans une démarche personnelle dans le but de construire un parcours d'apprentissage personnalisé pour répondre à leurs propres interrogations. Ils exploreront les ressources dans le schéma "Pearl Trees"ci-dessous et échangeront avec des partenaires dans d'autres pays sur les idées qu'ils formuleront. Ce projet n'a fait que commencer, et le côté "innovant" trouvera son expression dans les travaux qu'ils réaliseront dans les semaines à venir.

La Classe Immersive à Educatec

Jeudi soir, au sortir du salon Educatec, nous étions invités dans les bureaux de Microsoft à Issy les Moulineaux pour l'inauguration de la Classe Immersive. Quel plaisir que de voir cet espace riche en technologie, que nous ne connaissions auparavant que par des esquisses d'architecte. Le sol interactif permet de travailler l'expression corporelle de façon ludique et pédagogique. Le mur interactif, plus classique (c'est en quelque sorte un TBI dématérialisé) permet de travailler avec des documents tels que les manuels scolaires, par exemple. Les autres technologies tout simplement époustouflantes. La table Pixelsense se prête à des jeux éducatifs ("serious games"), mais peut aussi permettre la réalisation d'expériences de physique ou d'astronomie. Le projecteur Kinect permet non seulement de commander l'ordinateur avec des gestes, mais aussi de s'approprier des volumes en mathématiques, de faire des visioconférences, voire de plonger les élèves dans des mondes virtuels comme Second Life. Le vidéoprojecteur 3D accentue davantage cet effet d'immersion, surtout dans les domaines de l'architecture, de l'ingénierie ou de l'anatomie. L'espace multipoint ainsi que les tablettes Surface serviront à la création et à la collaboration des élèves, en reliant les autres activités proposées et en permettant aux élèves de faire des billets de blog, d'écrire des articles sur le journal de leur établissement ou même de communiquer avec des partenaires étrangers.

Les possibilités offertes par cet ensemble de technologies sont très riches et diverses, et les inscriptions pour en profiter se font déjà nombreuses. Les concepteurs pédagogiques de l'association Projetice, partenaires de ce projet, travaillent ensemble pour créer des parcours éducatifs dans plusieurs disciplines, dont les lettres classiques, SVT, SES et les langues vivantes. Regardons de plus près un de ces projets, "Arts et techniques de l'Antiquité" de Robert Delord (Académie de Grenoble).

Ce parcours est prévu pour une classe de 3ème ou de lycéens en lettres classiques. Des groupes de 3 ou 4 élèves se dispersent autour des pôles suivants:
- Projecteur Kinect:

• Art oratoire: La gestuelle de l'orateur romain
• Reconstruire une toiture romaine
• Reconstruire un temple grec

- Mur interactif:

• Moulage des corps de Pompéi
• Architecture des aqueducs romains
• Découverte des fresques romaines

- Sol interactif:

• Construire une voie romaine
• Fabriquer une mosaïque de sol
• En route vers les fonctions grammaticales en Latin

- Table Pixelsense:

• L'abaque romain
• Le cadran solaire romain

- Tablettes surface:

• Compte-rendu écrit et photomontage
• Reportage pour le journal du collège
• Création de contenus

- Espace multipoint serveur:

• Traduction collective de textes en rapport avec les autres pôles

Nous espérons que les expériences réalisées dans ce laboratoire éducatif grandeur nature permettront par la suite de proposer des activités réalisables dans des salles de classe existantes, moins richement fournies en matériel. Cependant, nous espérons aussi que les collectivités telles que les mairies, les conseils généraux et les conseils régionaux comprendront l'intérêt de ces technologies et attribueront les crédits nécessaires à leur implantation dans nos établissements. La présence d'outils technologiques représente la condition nécessaire à la réalisation de l'Ecole du 21ème siècle et à la réussite des élèves de demain.

D'autres articles sur La Classe Immersive:
- sur le Café Pédagogique
- sur France Info
- sur Le Nouvel Observateur

La Classe Immersive

Réaliser la mise en place d'une pédagogie favorable aux compétences du 21e siècle (21st century skills: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication) est grandement favorisée par un environnement riche en technologie. Le projet "Classe Immersive", issu de la collaboration entre Microsoft Education et l'association Projetice, nous montrera jusqu'où on peut aller en dépassant les murs de la salle de classe et en rendant actifs les apprentissages des élèves.


Un groupe d'enseignants engagés dans la refondation de l'école (membres de Projetice, enseignants innovants) travaille sur les scénarios pédagogiques, les approches et les activités rendus possibles par l'existence de cette salle de classe témoin, installé dans les bureaux de Microsoft à Paris. Après quelques démonstrations au Salon Educatec ce 21 au 23 novembre, la Classe Immersive devrait ouvrir ses portes début décembre 2012, permettant aux enseignants impliqués dans le projet d'amener des classes d'élèves et utiliser les différents pôles d'activités pour faire avancer leurs élèves.

• Vidéoprojection: murs et sols interactifs, immersion numérique totale
• Capteurs de mouvements Kinect, Visioconférence Lync
• Projection 3D, réalité augmentée, manuels numériques
• Table Samsung SUR40 Pixelsense: travail collaboratif en groupe, applications et serious games
• Equipement en tablettes, Smartphones et PCs (Ultrabooks, etc)

 Est-ce l'avenir de l'éducation? Même s'il est difficile d'imaginer aujourd'hui beaucoup de salles de classe équipées de la sorte, il est certain que nous devons apprivoiser ces technologies pour sortir l'éducation  de l'approche frontale du 19e siècle et pour entrer résolument dans le 21e. Les élèves que nous avons en classe de nos jours sont "branchés" en permanence, par smartphones, par tablettes, par ordinateurs, avec l'accès aux réseaux sociaux, aux vidéos et surtout à la création d'information. Pourquoi est-ce que nos salles de classe seraient les seuls endroits où la technologie d'information et de communication soit interdite?

Dans un premier temps, je crois qu'il faut surmonter les craintes liées aux dangers d'Internet pour rendre possible et accessible la création de réseaux d'apprentissage personnels (personal learning environments) et pour relier nos élèves au monde extérieur, que ce soit à des sites d'information, à des correspondants internationaux ou aux outils de création interactifs qui foisonnent sur Internet. Avec la technologie que les élèves possèdent déjà, et avec celle que nous installerons de plus en plus dans nos salles de classe, nous pourrons commencer cette ouverture, à condition de permettre l'installation de réseaux wifi dans l'espace éducatif. Il faut privilégier le "mobile learning" surtout si l'on veut que les élèves communiquent avec des partenaires éloignés.

Créativité, pensée critique, collaboration et communication sont les compétences du 21e siècle. Comment les favoriser dans ce genre d'environnement? Et comment ramener quelques bribes de cet environnement riche en technologie dans nos salles de classe actuelles?

Opening the classroom through literature

This is the second year that the French National Education system has offered courses specifically mandated to study "foreign literature in a foreign language" (LELE, littérature étrangère en langue étrangère), and the first year this course has been available to students in their final year of secondary education (terminale). I feel it's both an opportunity and a challenge for teachers wishing to bring their students into 21st century education – whether they are willing or reluctant participants. More on that below.

One thing that seems to bother colleagues with whom I've spoken is the time constraint. They have a hard time accepting that they can do anything but brush the broadest and most fragmentary tableau of English-language literature with only one and a half contact hours per week. This miserly portion of time, in addition to grappling with widely disparate levels of language mastery amongst their students, really sets their teeth on edge. Clearly, this is a prime opportunity to encourage students to work outside the classroom.

I've opted to work with a textbook called "Discovering Literature" (Nathan) which presents an overview of English-language literature in nine "literary trails", the idea being to give students a taste of each of these themes or literary movements through short excerpts from major works. It's a fine idea, as far as it goes, but extremely hard to realize within the 40 to 48 hours of contact time a school year offers. The solution is to take a project-based learning approach and give students access to a wider swath of literary content that they can pick and choose from according to their own personal preferences. Motivation is obviously a key here, and linking student preferences to literary themes helps bridge the gap. So many classical literary themes are present in popular culture today, but students don't often have the slightest idea where the things they think are so cool, in their favorite music, television programs, films or video games, come from. Letting them make this connection, unleashing the coveted "aha! moment", fosters motivation as well as creativity.

In my first unit, on the Gothic novel, students began brainstorming around selected images from the Gothic tradition, including several from the recent cinematic version of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" an excerpt from which many of them had studied in class the year before. They then spent two class hours on an excerpt from Le Fanu's "Carmilla", a classic of the genre, making mindmaps of the main characters and building a timeline of Gothic literature from the overview in this textbook – and the Wikipedia entry on Gothic fiction. Then each of them selected a work from a list I'd compiled that included "etexts", audiobooks and a few film clips that were all accessible on the Internet, thanks in part to the fact that, given the age of most of the works, they were in the public domain.

While the resource list for this first unit was indeed a simple list, I compiled the second unit using "Pearl Trees", an innovative web 2.0 tool that is a combination between mindmapping and bookmarking apps. Students could see major works of utopian and dystopian fiction in a glance, thanks to the branching diagram of the mindmap, and click and navigate through the different resources while trying to choose which work they wanted to delve further into.



The next stage of the project will see students collaborating within the classroom to make their own "Pearl Tree" map of a new literary theme. Following that, their collaboration will go beyond the walls to discuss the theme with students in other countries, for example with Kelli Etheredge's students in Alabama. Moving my students into international collaboration will, I hope, open up questions of global citizenship and critical thinking that they would have scarcely had time to rush past if we'd been working only with a textbook, lists of vocabulary and grammar points, as is typically the case in a foreign language classroom here in France.

Student-centered projects that involve selecting resources for their own work, organizing their ideas in innovative ways and reaching out to students in other countries who are also grappling with similar issues can help foster creativity, encourage critical thinking, engage students through communication and collaboration – in short, achieving the four cornerstones of 21st century education.

Transforming teacher education

Reading and listening to Sir Ken Robinson talk about education struck a chord with me, especially when he speaks about the way today's educational institution is designed like a factory.

"We have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it. […] Schools are still pretty much organized along factory lines; ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It's like the most important thing about them is their date on manufacture."

Looking back on some twenty years' experience teaching in the French national education system, I couldn't agree more. We're educating kids for the 19^th century, not the 21^st. The most important quality a student has, apparently, is that he should be seen and not heard. At end of trimester meetings, I hear colleagues bemoaning the fact that some students won't sit still, keep quiet and copy their lessons off the board like docile automatons. Rarely do any of them talk about working outside the "programme" – the officially mandated curriculum for their discipline.

Yet this is exactly what we need to do. For example, as an English teacher, my "programme" consists in long lists of grammar points, and more or less utopian targets of the proficiency levels all students should reach by the time they leave school. It's a mandate for standardization and conformity. While we have been fortunate that the official instructions for foreign language teachers mention more and more often elements of 21^st century learning – task-based and project-based learning, international communication and collaboration projects like eTwinning and Comenius – so few teachers really take those innovations to heart. In my region (Région Centre, Académie Orléans-Tours) I often feel like I am the only one carrying the torch of 21^st century learning practices. Certainly, none of my fellow teacher trainers seem to be operating on this wavelength.

Indeed, teacher training is in crisis here in France. The institutions responsible for teacher training, the IUFMs, were first gutted and then abolished by the Sarkozy administration, with very little actual teacher training of any sort taking their place. The budgets for in-service teacher training have been shrinking every year, and there seems to be little or no support for innovation and the four C's of 21^st century learning - Creativity, Critical thinking, Collaboration and Communication. What would really help is a concerted effort from the new Hollande government, and whoever he eventually selects as Education Minister, to revitalize both initial and in-service teacher training. If there were a network of teacher trainers bringing this message out from the Ministry to the Académies to schools and to individual teachers, we might see real qualitative changes to the school-as-factory paradigm that has inflicted so much damage on the educational potential of young people today.

Teacher training for the 21st century

I'm just emerging from 3 months of intensive teacher training sessions - in addition to my regular classload - and reconnecting to 21st century learning networks. Wow! is the only word to really describe it. Reading and viewing the work of innovators like Sir Ken Robinson and Will Richardson fills me with wonder... but also with some measure of frustration. It's all well and good to preach against broadcast-based teaching, against the school-as-factory model and against standardized testing, but as a classroom teacher I only really have control over what takes place in my own classroom. Even as a teacher trainer, what I do with other colleagues boils down to giving advice and sharing ideas about what a given classroom teacher can do during the couple hours a week they have with a class of students.

Passivity and broadcasting(from Sir Ken Robinson's RSA talk)

Robinson argues convincingly for profound changes in learning practices from the top down, at the level of the national education system. And yet, all the innovators I know say they are swimming against the tide. Profound changes like curriculum and class scheduling aren't within the grasp of a classroom teacher. The best they can do is adapt what happens within the walls of their own classroom to 21st century learning practices. "For the most part," Robinson notes, "these innovations are happening not because of the dominant cultures of education but in spite of them."

Even within these constraints, there are many things the classroom teacher can do. Simple software, like Audacity and Photostory, can free students from the broadcast mode of teaching, allowing them to spend an entire class period speaking in their target language, instead of the few minutes each will get out of a class of thirty students interacting individually with their teacher. Tools like interactive whiteboards can help focus students' attention on content, while providing opportunities for interaction that simple videoprojection can't provide. Moreover, the single most important innovation doesn't involve technology at all, but a specific attitude towards what constitutes teaching and learning. Project-based learning, where students make significant decisions in the process through which they acquire learning, is a huge step forward over traditional broadcast-based teaching. I first began promoting project-based learning some twelve years ago when I discovered the WebQuest concept pioneered by innovators like Bernie Dodge and Tom March. At the time, most web-based activities simply asked students to find specific pieces of information from their online research; students were still only consuming information, albeit in a more autonomous and self-directed way than in the traditional classroom. But the WebQuest concept goes way beyond the "treasure hunt" by giving students a concrete goal, a real-life role that they can adopt in seeking their goal, and a step-by-step process that helps keep them on task over the course of their work.

What I realized over the years, during teacher training sessions where I helped colleagues to develop WebQuests to use with their students in a computer lab, was that this task-based approach doesn't necessarily need to take place using web-based research. It works just as well with students in a classroom, working alone, in pairs or in small groups, trying to achieve concrete goals and use their target language along the way, rather than having them passively absorb the knowledge broadcast by their teacher.

Changing the classroom from the bottom up is an incremental proposition. I have changed my own classroom, and exposed some hundred or so colleagues every year to elements of that change. Other innovators are on similar quests, and yet, statistically, only a very small percentage of teachers within the French national education institution have begun the shift towards a new teaching paradigm. Perhaps with the arrival of a new government in the next few days there will be a new chance for bringing this paradigm shift to the very top of the institution.