In French-speaking Switzerland, a competency-based curriculum for compulsory school came into effect in 2011 (CIIP, 2010-2016). This entry into force puts new demands on teachers and teacher training, especially regarding assessment as already observed elsewhere (López-Pastor, Kirk, Lorente-Catalán, MacPhail & Macdonald, 2013). For assessing their students’ skills in physical education (PE), teachers are now asked to use complex tasks and to collect traces of students’ activity. Some have difficulties doing so. Either because, as generalist primary teacher, their knowledge and skills in PE are weak, or because, as PE teacher at primary or secondary school, their initial teacher training did not prepare them for this new paradigm. To help teachers teach and assess in PE according to a competency-based approach, a team of researchers and teacher trainers in the Swiss cantons of Geneva, Jura, Fribourg and Valais proposed teachers to experiment with “scholastic forms of practice” (SFP) in basketball and middle-distance race, within the framework of a didactic engineering (Artigue, 1989; Artigue & Perrin-Glorian, 1991). SFP are complex tasks “at the interface of sport (with its cultural and historical foundations, rules and techniques) and physical education (with its institutional constraints, its timetable, and the heterogeneity of its students)” (Mascret, 2011, p. 2). Those elaborated by the research team focus on specific competencies such as “moving forward to shoot without opposition” (basketball) or “managing his/her speed to run regularly without interruption on a fixed distance” (middle-distance race). They include observation tools that students can use for peer assessment purposes. These SFP are designed to serve as a starting point and an assessment tool of a teaching sequence of minimum six PE lessons. During this experimentation, teachers are expected to provide their students with additional learning tasks and experiences that target the specific competencies. Sometimes, researchers may consider that teachers experimenting with the SFP do not take the theoretical foundations of the didactic engineering work into account, or do not target the specific competencies, what may have negative consequences on students’ learning opportunities. In this paper, we aim at investigating the transactional process of collaboration that occur between researchers and teachers in these particular cases.  

The theoretical background of this study is based on the joint action in didactics framework (Amade-Escot & Venturini, 2015; Ligozat, 2011) and on cultural-historical psychology (Vygotsky, 1978). We assume that throughout the experimentation period, the relationship between the researchers and the teachers may oscillate between two contrasted forms of relationship: the didactic relationship, i.e. the ternary relationship between the teacher and the student grounded on the piece of a knowledge at stake, which is an asymmetric one, in that the teacher knows from the beginning of the teaching what the student has to learn (Coulange, 2014; Joffredo-Le Brun, Morellato, Sensevy & Quilio, 2018); and the epistemic cooperative relationship, i.e. the kind of dialogue between researchers and teachers who participate in a cooperative engineering, which is a symmetric one, in that the researcher can learn from the teacher, and the teacher can learn from the researcher (Joffredo-Le Brun et al., 2018; Sensevy, Forest, Quilio & Morales, 2013). Considering that intrapsychic conflict (Vygotsky, 1997) is the foundation of teachers’ professional development (Bertone, Méard, Euzet, Ria & Durand, 2003; Moussay, Flavier, Zimmermann & Méard, 2011), we thus investigate how researchers support teachers’ reflections and actions with signs and instruments that are interpsychic in nature, so that teachers experience conflicts at an intrapsychic level.

The research team follows a didactic engineering research methodology, which consists of four phases: (a) preliminary studies; (b) conception and a priori analysis; (c) experimentation; (d) a posteriori analysis and validation (Artigue, 1989; Artigue & Perrin-Glorian, 1991). The first two phases resulted in one provisional SFP in basketball (for the late primary school and early secondary school) and four provisional SFP in middle-distance race, respectively for early primary school, late primary school, early secondary school and late secondary school. This paper is exclusively concerned with the third phase, i.e. experimentation, during which researchers observe how teachers implement the SFP in their classes and accompany them throughout the implementation. Two researchers and 2 PE primary teachers in Geneva experimented with the SFP in basketball. Nine researchers and 13 generalist primary teachers, 3 PE primary teachers and 14 PE secondary teachers are currently experimenting with the four SFP in middle-distance race in the cantons of Geneva, Jura, Fribourg and Valais. Researchers’ experience ranges from 2 to 23 years while teachers’ experience ranges from 1 to 35 years. Four categories of data are collected: video recording, self-confrontation, written documents, and research diaries. The video recording data are collected during the lessons, using a video camera and a HF microphone worn by the teacher. The self-confrontation data are obtained during individual interviews with the teachers, during which they are confronted with the video recording of their actions. They are encouraged to describe and comment on what they were doing. When the teacher’s actions keep students from learning what they are supposed to learn in the SFP from the researcher’s point of view, this one questions the teacher in such a way as to raise his/her awareness of the consequences of his/her actions. Written documents are lesson preparations, assessment tools or record sheets, etc. that teachers are willing to share with researchers. Finally, research diaries are written records of the researchers’ activities, thoughts and feelings throughout the research process. These ones are particularly useful to keep traces of informal discussions between researchers and teachers. Data analysis is based on the verbatim transcription of the self-confrontation interviews. We first identify moments when teachers become aware of the inconstancy of their conceptions or of the incompatibility of the evoked actions. Then we identify in the interviewer’s questions or in the research diaries what may be the cause of these intrapsychic conflicts.

Data collection and analysis are still in progress, but we already identified several intrapsychic conflicts. A first example concerns introduction of an unintended rule by the two PE primary teachers experimenting with the SFP in basketball. Focusing on counterattack, this one consists in a 3-on-3 play on a half-court with one basket. When the attackers lost the ball, all six players have to turn around field marker cones located at the back of the half-court before being allowed to attack or defend the target again. Both teachers unexpectedly introduced the following rule: “after each shot on target, the game restarts from the back of the half-court”. As reported in the research diaries, informal discussions between researchers and teachers raised teachers’ awareness of the negative consequence of this rule on students’ learning opportunities: “I will change this rule […], it breaks some counterattacks”. A second example concerns the ostensive transmission of action rules related to speed regulation by two primary teachers experimenting with two different SFP in middle-distance race (ex.: “You started too rapidly!”). During the self-confrontation interviews, researchers raised teachers’ awareness of the incompatibility of their actions with learning issues related to self-regulation of speed. For example, one researcher asked: “By saying that, what did you want to teach and how was your position?”, and the teacher replied: “To run without interruption during all the series. But I think that I gave too much information after the first sequence. I feel that I said too much”. To resume, our results show how researchers support teachers’ reflections and actions with signs (e.g., questions during the self-confrontation interviews) and instruments (e.g., list of learning issues included in the presentation of the SFP), and how teachers internalize these tools offered to them (Bertone et al., 2003; Moussay et al., 2011).

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