Collective design as a support for professional development: a case study

Integrating digital resources into teachers’ practice requires, notably, the availability of resources offering flexibility of use (Morgan, 1990) and proximity to teachers’ schemes (Crisan, Lerman, & Winbourne, 2007). Collective designing and sharing of these resources can facilitate this integration and contribute to teachers’ professional development (Quéré, 2019). The e-FRAN IDEE research group work looks at the cooperation between teachers and researchers jointly designing a digital resource to teach English. The aim of this paper is to observe a part of cooperation on one teacher’s professional development. In this case study, I show that the interactions between teachers in the group, Ginger and Val, lead to the discovery of new resources, and working with the latter foster new knowledge.


Introduction
Also mentioned elsewhere (Quéré, Gruson, & Le Hénaff, 2018), the research presented is part of a French research project called e-FRAN IDEE 2 (Digital Interactions for Education and Teaching) conducted in conjunction with a research group studying Collectives' Teachers Group and Resources for Students' Autonomy (CERAD). As part of a multidisciplinary group, we are studying to ascertain if collective work, here between teachers, can help the latter to develop their use of digital resources in class. For a better integration of digital uses in schools, it is essential to involve teachers in the designing of resources (CNN, 2012). In foreign language didactics, research has shown that digital resources "may offer regular opportunities to modify the very logic of teaching/learning practices" (Gruson & Sensevy, 2013, p. 222). Furthermore, collective designing and sharing of resources can facilitate the integration of digital resources into teachers' practices and contribute to their professional development (Quéré, 2017).

Theoretical framework
The theoretical framework named documentational approach is applied (Gueudet & Trouche, 2010). Gueudet and Trouche (2010) argue that teachers develop documents comprising resources but also a scheme 3 of use of these resources during their work, and that their professional development is directly linked with the development of these documents. All the resources are organised into a resources system. It can be an individual resources system when it concerns the resources of an actor, or a collective resources system, for all of the group's resources.
In order to highlight these documents, document tables are used (Gueudet & Le Hénaff, 2015). One line of a document table corresponds to a document developed, or being developed, by a teacher in relation to a goal identified for a given situation class 4 . The document table is used to describe the document, by associating resources and a scheme for using them. The scheme is composed, among other things, of operational invariants, which will be interpreted as professional knowledge in the result and discussion section.
The aim of this paper is thus to analyse the effects of collective design on teachers' knowledge involved in this work.

Method
The data collected is a part of a larger study, mentioned earlier, e-FRAN IDEE.
The qualitative methodology is built as follows: regular follow-ups of meetings, observations of implementation in the classroom, and interviews with the teachers. This data collection took place over two years. It includes a total of 36 hours of meeting videos and 24 hours of classroom observations. The teacher's group is composed of Ginger, Val, and Aurore. For this case study, one of the teachers has been chosen, Ginger, and one particular episode showing her activity is analysed.
She is one of the teachers who has pushed the most important didactic reflections in the group, and the evolution of her knowledge, related to her work on resources, is the most remarkable.

Results and discussion
The objective of the E-FRAN IDEE's group is to produce a digital resource that seeks to foster the development of year 9 students' autonomy in their learning of English. The theme of the resource is based on Sherlock Holmes' novels. The example below is taken from the implementation of this resource in Ginger's classroom: an activity carried out on the creation of a word cloud.
The example analysed focuses on the word cloud activity. To start this activity, Ginger does not communicate with her students the theme at the beginning of the sequence. They must listen to the soundtrack 'Guess who' and recognise the words/clues that will enable them to identify the main character of this theme. After individually taking notes in their notebooks, the pupils must list the words recognised on the 'Beekast' software in order to collectively design a word cloud. Figure 1 is the result of this activity. only, without projection on the board. Secondly the collaborative word cloud, developed, was hidden until the teacher decided to show it to the whole class. In addition to temporarily hiding the cloud, Ginger explained she was using the software's features to prevent students from making the same word bigger: "[to]set up the word cloud so that they [teach students] don't type the same word twice. They could enter ten or more words but not the same word. For example, typing 'job, job, job' to make it bigger is not allowed".
As a result of teacher's work analysis, the following document table is produced (see Table 1). • allow the student to see the words he or she is typing; • lock the number of entries to ensure that new words are searched for; • display the collaborative cloud once the task has been completed.
• allowing students to see their work allows them to control what they have written; • using the software's settings allows you to control student actions and limit attempts at simple copying; • showing students the final collective production supports students' involvement in the work.
This document table introduces a document under development and shows the impact of designing work with Val on Ginger's choices. For example the operational invariant, allowing students to see their own work but not that of other peers, is a design choice arising from collective work. Indeed after Val explained her difficulties with the word cloud activity -pupils did not see the words they typed on the computer displayed either on their workstation or on the board during the activity; this slowed their progress -Ginger made the choice to select a new software, Beekast, and to adjust her didactical choices according to Val's feedback.
In this document table, Ginger's individual resource systems (Beekast) and her operational invariants, resulting from her past experiences and exchanges with Val, are articulated to give rise to a document (Table 1) which is interpreted as a sign of the teacher's professional development.

Conclusions
In conclusion, in this short paper I presented a part of Ginger's case. I have shown that her participation in the collective teachers' work evolves her knowledge in two ways: first she relies on the knowledge of the other members to adjust her implementation, and second this leads her to modify the software used and adapt the instructions given. This work of adjustment, modification, and analysis, linked to interactions with Val, has effects on Ginger's knowledge. Collective design allows teachers to access new resources, here digital resources, and seems to support the development of new knowledge among the members involved in this work.
The continuation of my work is based on the verification of these initial findings.
To do this, I will observe a collective composed only of teachers in order to see how collective design can have an effect on their knowledge in the absence of researchers.