In the context of the nationwide rollout of “constellation” training for primary school teachers in France, based on the lesson study model, this contribution examines how current teacher professional development arrangements support – or fail to support – teachers’ professional learning in addressing pupils’ learning inequalities. Situated within the conference theme “Knowing and Acting” and Network 1 “Professional Learning and Development,” our study analyzes how teacher collectives refine their observation and interpretation of pupil activity, and under what conditions research-based knowledge can transform classroom practices and pupil learning.

Drawing on the French case of primary-level “constellations,” this work is situated within a European framework characterised by a crisis in teacher recruitment and attractiveness across nearly all EU countries. Given the growing difficulties in recruiting and retaining teachers, professional development models are increasingly presented as central levers for improving the effectiveness and equity of educational systems.

In the French primary education system, “constellations” are small groups of six to nine teachers from the same grade level or nearby schools, brought together over a school year by a pedagogical advisor or trainer for around 30 hours. The programme combines 18 hours of collective out-of-class work (inputs, lesson planning, observation analysis) with 12 hours of classroom implementation and peer observation. Central to French and mathematics professional development plans, this format seeks to connect training and daily practice through theoretical inputs, peer reflection, lesson design, and experimentation. Inspired by Japanese Lesson Study, it promotes a practice-focused approach to professional development, while remaining highly prescribed and aligned with national priorities.

The present study does not consider this format inherently “research-based”. Depending on the district, trainer, and professional culture, constellations may draw on research frameworks or rely mainly on institutional resources and peer exchange. The study focuses on this variability in theoretical tooling and its professional development effects.

This research extends findings from previous studies on initial teacher education. A first study showed the marginal place of the sociology of learning inequalities in teacher education curricula and the limited focus on real pupil activity, leading novices to develop essentialist views of working-class pupils’ difficulties. A second study on an “integrated” teacher education experiment in Créteil demonstrated that combining class observations, workshops, lesson design, and research initiation fostered reflexive postures and greater attention to pupils experiencing difficulties.

Our question now concerns professional development within constellations: to what extent and under what conditions do these prescribed peer-training formats develop teachers’ capacities to observe and interpret pupil activity in ways that reduce learning inequalities? More specifically, the study examines how observing pupils’ activity during a pre-planned, problematized didactic task reshapes teachers’ perceptions of pupils, especially those who do not fit conventional school expectations.

The theoretical framework combines three strands. First, a sociology of learning inequalities perspective considers disparities as outcomes of situated teaching-learning processes, linking prescribed tasks, enacted tasks, and pupil/teacher interpretations. This approach enables analysis of pupils’ activity while avoiding psychologizing or culturalist interpretations of difficulties.

Second, a socio-didactic framework focuses on tasks, instructions, resources, and interactions, while considering pupils’ socially differentiated relationships to school and learning. From this perspective, the study explores how cross-observations in constellations may move beyond binary views of success and failure by examining how pupils interpret expectations, use resources, and reshape tasks.

Third, a Vygotskian developmental perspective frames constellations as proximal zones of development, supporting shifts from everyday categorizations of pupils toward more elaborated understandings of pupils’ learning activity and difficulties.

The present study combines an analysis of prescriptive documents (e.g. ministerial texts, academic guidelines, training references) with an ethnographic study of several constellations. Our methodology involves the observation of the full constellation cycle, which comprises the following elements: launch meetings between trainers and teams, co-construction of training objects, theoretical and practical contribution from trainers, collective lesson planning, cross-observations of sessions, and debriefs. These are audio/video-recorded (per local feasibility) with ethnographic field notes to document interactions, analytical category circulation, teacher engagement modes, and control vs. professional development tensions noted in prior teacher training research. We also conduct interviews with participating teachers, constellation trainers, and (where feasible) academic trainer-of-trainers. Teacher interviews cover training trajectories (initial and continuing), prior constellation experiences, pupil difficulty representations, perceived agency, and the contribution of devices to professional learning. The methodology employed involves dual cross-referencing. Firstly, the present study traces "chains" linking classroom/pupil observations, constellation discussions, and interview discourses in order to identify how professionnal knowledge circulate, are appropriated, or transformed. Secondly, the contextualisation of constellation data against prior findings on integrated initial training is undertaken, with the objective of identifying continuities and ruptures in the manner in which teachers observe and interpret pupil activity with regard to reducing inequality. This strategy is characterised by its comprehensive approach, encompassing various levels of analysis, from macro policy and framing to micro classroom interactions. It emphasises the integration of research, knowledge, professional development and school equity linkages. Preliminary findings suggest that constellations effectively foster teacher professional development when built on guided pupil activity observations centered on pre-planned didactic tasks. In the cases that were studied, observation sessions and collective debriefs enabled some teachers to shift their focus from broadly spotting pupils to finely tracing approaches, errors, cue-taking, and renunciations. Marking each pupil's activity, especially among those who were struggling, was also enabled. However, these shifts are not systematic.

Despite the inclusion of dedicated moments in the constellation format for observing pupils, trainers – and consequently trainees – tend not to engage with pupils' precise cognitive and language-related activity. This limitation is particularly evident in the discourse of trainers, which rarely engages with fine-grained analyses of pupils' meaning-making processes, instead privileging more general or surface-level characterisations. The analysis indicates that, even when research-based analytical tools are introduced at other moments within the constellation, cross-observation phases struggle to draw effectively on these resources, which remain difficult to integrate for the analysis of pupils' activity. Collective discussions have a tendency to revert to conventional forms of pupil categorisation, drawing on familiar labels (e.g., "good"/"poor" pupil, "academic"/"non-academic," "motivated"/"unmotivated," "attentive"/"inattentive") that risk confining pupils within fixed interpretations of their difficulties – even within teams explicitly committed to combating inequalities. Trainers face particular challenges integrating actual pupil activity into their practices: under policy pressures from institutional instructions, they struggle to bridge from theoretical inputs to real classroom dynamics involving multiple teachers and pupil groups. In response, teachers then struggle to truly observe pupils’ activity even when seeing them “in action” during training sessions Our contribution shows that constellations’ potential to address learning inequalities depends less on cross-observation time than on the quality of analytical tools provided to teacher collectives. In this perspective, constellations—and more broadly lesson study-style models—can function as bridges between research and professional knowledge, provided research insights are used as tools to understand pupils’ real learning activity and difficulties. Situated in the French context, this finding resonates with the broader European and global crisis in teacher recruitment and attractiveness, highlighting the strategic role of such professional development approaches.

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