We were all students, and therefore we have all experienced the very variable qualities of the teachers we had. If you plunge back into your memories and think of the teachers you have the most and the least: what were the qualities that differentiated them?
You probably think of knowing how to make the material interesting, to make you want to study it, to know how to clearly explain difficult concepts, to understand the difficulties of the students and to adapt their teaching, to give each student confidence in the fact that he can progress and that the school is there to help him. You no doubt also think of enforcing his authority within the class, of knowing how to manage the excesses of the students, while remaining calm, benevolent and just, rather than being authoritarian, shouting on them or humiliating them. You have probably not thought of the fact of sufficiently controlling school materials. In fact, it is rather rare in France to meet teachers whose ability to teach is limited mainly by their low competence in the discipline.
Teachers are the first to complain about them
This contrast between disciplinary and non -disciplinary skills is like the way in which France selects and trains its teachers. The competitions that are the aggregation, the CAPES, and to a lesser extent the recruitment competition for school teachers, are still very focused on disciplinary mastery. They accredit the idea that a good teacher is essentially the one who masters his subject. Likewise, the initial training of teachers is mainly devoted to disciplines and their didactics (how to teach each specific discipline), rather than to the student’s psychology and to pedagogy. It is therefore not very surprising whether in these latter areas that teachers are most often in default. They are the first to complain about it, especially in Talis surveys conducted by the OECD.
Even more surprising, there is no national teacher training program in France precisely defining the knowledge and skills they must master. As a result, the composition and quality of the training offer are very variable from one academy to another because they are mainly based on locally available resources, on the preferences of teacher-researchers and trainers. And this despite a certain number of constraints imposed by national directives. By comparison, the program for the first six years of medical studies is not left to the free choice of universities (however autonomous) or to the preferences of medical teachers. It is codified at the national level in large detail, in 11 chapters and 362 items. Why should we take the training of teachers less seriously?
Take advantage of the demographic decline
With these observations, the Training and resources working group that I coordinate within the Scientific Council for National Education has just publish a proposal for a new repository teachers’ skills. Without denying the crucial importance of mastery of school disciplines, this proposal aims above all to specify in detail the non -disciplinary knowledge and skills which should be ideally controlled by teachers. This repository is based on several decades of research in psychology and education which have highlighted the conditions most conducive to school learning and on educational practices which are most likely to create these conditions. The future will say if a minister seizes this proposal to more precisely frame the teacher training programs or if this repository remains a simple source of inspiration available to training institutes who wish.
A final point is that a significant strengthening of teacher training cannot be done without means. You must not only update the training of trainers, but if we want to be able to strengthen the continuing education of teachers stationed, we must be able to give them time for this. If we opt for school time training, you must have enough replacement teachers available so that this is not done at the expense of students. If we opt for training outside school times, then it will undoubtedly be necessary to compensate teachers for this additional working time. Fortunately, France is in a situation of demographic decline: each year, fewer students enter the school system (97,000 fewer students scheduled for the start of the 2025 school year compared to 2024). All in recent years, this has enabled the ministry to reduce the number of positions without increasing classes. Perhaps we should think of taking advantage of this surplus of means to reinvest it in the training that our teachers deserve.
Franck Ramus, researcher at CNRS and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris)