The school year is coming to an end and this time I want to offer you two readings that I think are very enriching and that anyone working in education or interested in the subject should read – that includes everyone, I think, and I hope …
Explicit Teaching
Clermont Gauthier, Steve Bissonnette and Marie Bocquillon offer us a rich and scholarly work that should be required reading for both educational researchers and practicing teachers.
Theoretical and practical questions about explicit teaching (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2022) consists of two parts. The first, theoretical, offers a critique of received ideas in education; the second deals with practical matters.
This book, which is part of the increasingly heard call for evidence, will certainly be talked about. It will also, I am convinced, make known lots of work (and their practical implications) which we can only regret that they are not better known and applied.
The introduction sets the tone and clearly indicates the positioning of the authors — and I take the liberty of quoting them at length: [La recherche] has continued to progress over the past 40 years, and we now have empirical research results that are increasingly robust and cover the different facets of the teaching profession. Contemporary teaching research is based on what teachers do in the classroom; it attempts to identify the practices or strategies of teachers that are associated with student learning. It also teaches us that when we give ourselves the means, through experimental protocols, to rigorously observe and measure what is happening in the classroom, effective strategies emerge more clearly. So, instead of relying on preconceived ideas, on the fantasy of pseudo-miracle pedagogical approaches, we decided to pass everything through the critical filter of empirical research. »
In the first part, we will learn, in particular, about the effects of technologies and virtual teaching (a hot topic), the introduction of evidence into teacher training and learning communities.
A delightful chapter is devoted to the overly denigrated importance of tips and recipes for training teachers.
“Even if teachers need tricks and recipes to function, and research can offer them based on rigorous protocols, these tools are constantly devalued. Some academics are sounding the alarm about the supposed dangers of instrumental rationality in teaching and are actually undermining what ultimately harms practicing teachers and also, and above all, those in initial training. »
“It is time, say the authors, to rehabilitate the use of recipes in education! »
The second part of the book precisely gives ways of doing things, and even tips and recipes, and teachers will enjoy what is there. It discusses the importance of feedback, the consolidation of learning through practice, the fight against indiscipline through the explicit teaching of behaviors and even university pedagogy.
An example of these fascinating things that we discover there? The importance and effectiveness of spaced practice for learning and revising and this nifty trick called “Leitner’s box” to put it into practice — I’ll let you discover it. It can be done alone at home, in pairs and even in class.
As a bonus, in the summer issue of National Action Reading Notebookswe find a rich interview granted by Steve Bissonnette to Frédéric Morneau-Guérin who will prepare you for reading this essential work.
Visions of education in Quebec in the 19th and 20th centuries
We now move on to another, but just as rich, register: that of history with educational thinking and intellectuals in Quebec. Intellectuals born between 1850 and 1900 (PUL, 2021). Because as much as evidence is important, it is also essential to know the history, philosophy, sociology and policy of education.
Here, the numerous authors of this collective led by Olivier Lemieux, Jean-François Cardin and Denis Simard introduce us to the ideas on education of 12 Quebec thinkers born between 1850 and 1900. How did they conceive it? What vision of knowledge, of the human being, of the economy and of society animated them?
Chapters are notably devoted to Lionel Groulx, Brother Marie-Victorin, Léon Guérin and a few other well-known figures. But we also deal with people I knew little or nothing about, like Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand, Laure Gaudreault or Godfroy Langlois.
An exciting read!
See you on September 3. Until then, I wish you a wonderful summer, rest and good reading.