Learning within the school community, with the students
Creative Solutions
I had a great experience with 15 year-old students in 2012. The previous year, 20 children in 8th grades (out of 4 classes, so 120 students) had achieved very poor results. They were considered to have failed most of their courses. Given this situation, teachers and management choose to bring these students together in one class. This class had gathered around an art project. My goal was to get them out of the school as much as possible so they could realize that education was in fact related to the real world. So we established a partnership with a gallery and worked on identity and emotions. As the school year went, the students really “came back to school”. It was incredible to implement this experimental class and very satisfying to find solutions to a given problem but it must be even greater to help avoid the problem whenever possible. This is why I thought I would use this assignment to gain knowledge about the reasons those students were about to drop out in the first place.
In Drop-Out Proof Your Kids by By Caroline Alphonso, Frank Peters, educational policy studies professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, says “dropping out is “a process rather than an event” (canadianfamily.ca/kids/baby/drop-out-proof-your-kids/). Why students drop out of school? Researchers Jordan, McPartland, & Lara characterized as “push” effects and “pull” effects the reasons students give for leaving school. “Push effects include situations or experiences within the school environment that intensify feelings of alienation, failure, and the desire to drop out. Pull effects include factors that are external to the school environment that divert students from the path leading towards school completion”.
Indeed, many circumstances may have lead to a point where the student dislikes school that much. In the article The Development of Children Ages 6 to 14, Jacquelynne S. Eccles lists the developmental Changes in Early Adolescence: puberty, changes in cognition (“increasing ability of children to think abstractly, consider the hypothetical as well as the real, consider multiple dimensions of a problem at the same time, and reflect on themselves and on complicated problems”), relationships with peers and family, friendships and peer conformity, family support for growing autonomy and contexts that promote development
Trouver un équilibre pour l'élève
En tant que professeurs, nous avons des attentes précises qu'il nous faut mesurer par des tests (évaluation sommative, évaluation de l’apprentissage). Cependant, aider les élèves à améliorer leur manière d'apprendre (évaluation formative, évaluation au service et en tant qu’apprentissage) est aussi capital . Il s'agit de trouver un équilibre entre ces deux formes d'évaluation qui sont complémentaires.
Pour l’évaluation au service et en tant qu’apprentissage, le processus d’évaluation est utilisé au cours de l'apprentissage, tandis que l'évaluation de l'apprentissage permet de mesurer la qualité de l'apprentissage des élèves en se basant sur des normes de performance établies. Ce type d'évaluation est généralement effectuée à la fin d'une unité et attribue une valeur numéraire pour représenter la qualité de l'apprentissage atteint par l’étudiant.
Ainsi il me semble que l’évaluation de l’apprentissage ne peut être efficace et juste que si l’évaluation diagnostique et formative a été menée correctement. Paul Black et Dylan Williams ont posé la question suivante en 1998 : « quelle stratégies aident le mieux les élèves ? ». Leur recherche leur a permis de définir l’évaluation au service de l’apprentissage autour de quatre grands principes :
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Utiliser de questions et des observations pour comprendre ce que les élèves comprennent ou peuvent faire ;
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Aider les élèves à comprendre la qualité du travail que l'on attend d'eux ;
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Aider les élèves à comprendre ce qu'ils devraient faire pour s’améliorer ;
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Utiliser des stratégies d'auto et d’inter-évaluations pour aider les élèves à développer des compétences d'autorégulation.
Je pense qu’améliorer l’apprentissage des élèves est un processus global qui doit se faire dans la continuité mais qui doit aussi être mesuré afin de leur permettre de se situer et de se fixer des objectifs en fonction de leurs résultats.
School issues
The more students we meet, the more we will be confronted to situations we are not familiar with. We have been students, we might have struggled then but it doesn’t make us magically understand what they are going through nowadays. Every student must be considered as an individual and listened to in order to grow and learn in a secure and nourishing environment.
Some issues will recur over of years of teaching, others may catch us by surprise. Keeping ourselves informed about such issues (bullying, student mental health, religious observance in schools, use of social media in classrooms, poverty and learning, etc…) will helps us keep empathy and help the ones suffering from them.