Former à aider un élève en mathématiques: une étude des potentialités d’un scénario de formation basé sur un jeu de rôles

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, a team of math education researchers at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) developed a role-playing approach for use in the initial training of primary teachers. Since its introduction, this approach has been the topic of several articles, thus allowing its potential to be analyzed from various angles. We “exported” this role-playing technique to the initial math training of school teachers in France, believing that the approach could benefit the practices of these future teachers. The approach provides an opportunity for the trainers first to observe the emerging practices being used by the trainees and then to intervene in the trainees’ zone of proximal development with regard to these practices. For our study, we created a role-play-based training scenario in which future teachers must help a student having difficulties with a task related to decimal numbers. In this article, we document the knowledge and practices demonstrated by the future teachers under these circumstances as well as the possibilities for trainers to use these results to help advance the trainees’ development.