Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-27
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Patrice Potvin, Professor in Science Didactics, University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)
Every day, primary and secondary school teachers have to deal with various challenges, specific to their students and their groups. Educational research offers avenues to address them… provided one has access to it and knows how to interpret it. And above all: are these approaches, often developed elsewhere, really adapted to the reality of the classroom?
The gap between the academic world and teaching practice thus remains very real. Academics are sometimes accused of designing innovative approaches from their “ivory tower,” but poorly connected. Conversely, teaching staff can sometimes appear reluctant to accept proposals stemming from research.
In this context, it is hardly surprising that theHigher Council of Education (2013), in a report on science education in primary and secondary schools, made a rather unflattering observation, highlighting how little practices have evolved in 30 years. In many classrooms, knowledge is still mainly transmitted, with little active participation from students.
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Teaching in kindergarten and primary school: same pathway, same practice?
When teachers also do research
To reduce this persistent gap between research and practice, a promising avenue is to involve teachers in conducting their own research in the classroom, about their students and their pedagogical interventions. Although conducted on a smaller scale, this research nevertheless offers valuable results, precisely because it is anchored in the real context of their classroom and therefore seems naturally more useful to them.
Enabling practitioners to appropriate tools and survey methods, to know what the available research already reveals, to better understand their own students, and to test interventions adapted to their reality themselves could constitute a powerful lever for professional development. Several studies show it:Occasional ‘top-down’ continuous training sessions struggle to produce lasting changes in practices.
Conversely, research projects carried out by teachers are not limited to a simple transfer of scientific knowledge to the school; they are based on its co-construction. By occasionally adopting the posture of a teacher-researcher, teachers thus become more receptive to research, better equipped to assess its value, and more capable of sustainably transforming their practices by drawing inspiration from it.
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Time to Learn: Rethinking Teachers’ Continuing Education
The Partnership: a supporting structure
Research activities that we have led at the University of Quebec in Montreal confirm the added value of this approach. ThePartnership for the development and success of scientific education at the secondary levelconstitutes a large-scale project bringing together more than 28 institutions, including 13 school service centers.
Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and its partners, it benefits from a total budget of more than 3 million dollars over seven years. ThePartnershipis based on an equal meeting of knowledge from educational research and experiential knowledge of secondary school science and technology teachers. Each partner school commits to providing participating teachers with five days per year freed from their teaching duties, as well as support provided by an educational advisor.
Specifically, researchers and teachers gather in working groups, spread across the greater Montreal area, in contexts that promote collegiality and exchanges.
These meetings allow teachers to develop their practice while breaking the isolation often felt in the profession. Within this collaborative framework, they work together and in a sustained way to find concrete solutions to challenges they share. With the support of the research team, they formulate their own questions, choose a way to answer them, collect data in their classroom, and analyze the results.
Each year ends with the presentation of these projects during theannual Partnership conferenceduring which colleagues can be informed of the discoveries made, and then allow their own students to benefit from them. Since these actions – questioning, analyzing, communicating – are already at the heart of the teaching profession, the goal is for them to be reinvested in their professional development, well beyond the duration of the project, and through their colleagues, whom they can then inspire.
During the early years, the work of learning communities focused their attention on misconceptions that are often at the origin of students’ errors, which they mobilize in their attempts to understand natural phenomena, as well as on pedagogical strategies to help them evolve.
The second phase of the Partnership will focus on broader issues related to science, such as biological racism, 5G, climate change, vaccination, as well as other current and controversial scientific questions.
All of these themes, as well as the didactic approaches they employ, constitute a major contribution to the professional training of teachers. While the required investment may, in the short term,increase the workload, it proves to be structuring, lasting, and beneficial for the practice in the long term.
From then on, faced with constantly evolving educational challenges, teachers equip themselves with solid benchmarks to question their practices, experiment with solutions, implement them in the classroom, and evaluate their effects.
This experience shows that these people can play an active role in the sustainable development of scientific culture, while contributing to the production and dissemination of knowledge on the effectiveness of targeted educational interventions. In this perspective, doing research in one’s classroom becomes a concrete way to evolve one’s practice.
Patrice Potvin received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Manon Beaudoin does not work for, advise, own shares in, receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than her research organization.
–ref. Research in education is more convincing when teachers conduct it themselves –https://theconversation.com/research-in-education-is-more-convincing-when-teachers-do-it-themselves-279381