Profs-Chercheurs

Teachers are in the front line to ensure high quality education for all. Improving teaching quality through the top-down identification and spread of evidence-based practices often fails as such recommendations may not match with teachers’ evolving challenges or practices. In fact, teachers learn to teach primarily based on their own experiences and exchanges with peers. Such experiential knowledge is produced and shared daily by millions of teachers. Yet this experiential knowledge is often intuitive, not generalisable and localized. To what extent can this experiential knowledge become a trusted knowledge base for the teaching profession?

In 2019 we created the Profs-Chercheurs programme profschercheurs.org, a participatory research program to engage teachers in producing trustworthy, shareable and cumulative knowledge about their own educational practices. It aims at orchestrating the collective intelligence of teachers to help them find collective solutions to their shared challenges.

More than 700 education stakeholders, from kindergarten to higher education, have joined the programme. Over 400 collaborative workshops have been held to help teachers define research questions, test hypotheses and experimental protocols, and analyze data. All this work is published and shared on an open collaborative platform plateforme.profschercheurs.org.

This project helped us identify the opportunities offered by collective intelligence and participatory research for building knowledge in education, but also the barriers and difficulties encountered in emulating such a dynamic in France.

Associated publications:

• Atal, I, Jeune, N., Gabard, C., Dessus, P., Pagnotta, M. (2025) Citizen science for educational sciences: engaging educators in the production of structured practice-based evidence at a large scale. Teacher Development, 1–22. doi: 10.1080/13664530.2025.2523359. Open access link