Welcome to...
Lycée Intégral Roger Lallemand
A little background...
The story of our visit to the Lycée Intégral Roger Lallemand (LIRL) is quite interesting. Indeed, by looking for inspiring schools with alternative teaching methods, we found articles about this alternative school and its headteacher. The school was founded by an interdisciplinary group : Les Pédagonautes. They met regularly during 6 years to design the perfect school : one that could educate young people in a different way to make them autonomous, responsible adults able to fit in society and participate actively. They were inspired by a French book: Changer le collège: c’est possible (Change the secondary school: it’s possible!).
The book’s two authors (André Giordan and Jérôme Saltet) express concern about the inadequacy of the current education system in preparing children for the challenges of their fast-changing environment. Despite the fast-paced evolution of knowledge, the educational system seems to no longer be able to fulfill its mission, and to be ill-adapted to the globalized world. More and more students are bored at school because middle school does not provide the essential knowledge and skills necessary for comprehending the world, the contemporary era, and themselves. It fails to guide individuals in finding their life’s purpose, hindering their ability to become responsible and happy contributors to the future. As a consequence, the authors studied inspiring teaching methods in France and around the world to draw a new approach to education by imagining the perfect middle school model. Their suggestions include different learning approaches, curriculum, progression, scheduling, supervision and staff training to implement a more effective educational experience. All of their principles have been carefully studied by Les Pédagonautes. They then started to build this new middle school by adapting this book’s principles to the Belgian educational system.
Some funny background information: a few years after their book release and the opening of LIRL, Jérôme Saltet and André Giordan imagined and built their own dream middle school : le Nouveau Collège du Val Fourré, situated in Mantes, near Paris. A few months before What’s Up School, I had an internship there, to study innovation in pedagogy in France. What a small world indeed…
- Monday 2 May 2022
- Travel day 7
- 2nd school visited
LEARN TO BE FREE
Ready to discover LIRL ?
When we arrived in front of LIRL building, we were a bit surprised. Indeed, it really seemed like a huge normal school building, quite old with an industrial style. As we entered, it felt like we were middle school students again, seeing students running late for class, teachers talking about classes.
The building is in a quite industrial style, but it is being renovated. Indeed, some of the floors are brand new while others are a bit older.
Now, let’s take a look at this new kind of middle school: welcome to the Lycée Intégral Roger Lallemand.
Because mottos are worth a thousand words...
Genesis of the school
Belgium’s demographic changes require opening new schools, but of what kind? That’s the question the Pédagonautes aim to answer. In today’s constantly evolving society, traditional methods are no longer effective and fail to promote equal opportunities. Schools do not diminish the impact of social background on individuals’ futures but rather exacerbate this pattern of predetermined outcomes. To address this issue, the educational system is currently undertaking reforms at an institutional level. New decrees and laws are being implemented, including the Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence, which focuses on four themes: learning at school, school organization, school professions, and school climate. This pact aims to reform the Belgian school system to effectively address new societal challenges.
The Pedagonautes believe that the current education system is not sufficient. They intend to develop a new learning system, a novel approach to learning, indeed a new kind of school. To achieve this, the interdisciplinary team took inspiration from Jérôme Saltet and André Giordan’s book and visited various schools worldwide deploying innovative pedagogical practices. Steiner’s and Freinet’s approaches, for instance, hold no secrets for them. After conducting extensive research and reflection, LIRL was created with a clear objective: “to train autonomous, responsible, enterprising, and happy citizens.”
Train
citizens
To acquire the knowledge and skills required to develop peacefully and learn throughout one’s life.
Students must learn to make informed choices and understand the real-world implications of their decisions.
Students are educated to take on responsibilities towards themselves, others, and the environment.
Test and bring projects to life, stimulate creativity.
By cultivating the desire to learn, and promote well-being and emotional management.
Creating a participatory democracy at school to cultivate the skills necessary to live together.
In promoting self-knowledge, social mobility, and the reduction of inequality, LIRL aims to reaffirm the social role of schools.
LIRL Renovated part
Creative synthesis of a theater workshop
Creative sythesis of a triplette about trains
Amazing workshop place at lirl
Good example of a student’s learning journal
LIRL in practice
The goal of LIRL is to facilitate active learning by adjusting teaching methods and materials and finding the right balance between individual support and group work to allow each student to progress at their own pace.
All core subjects (French, math, science, history, etc.) are taught by qualified teachers alongside newer disciplines such as economics, law, sociology, psychology, and ecology.
In practice, there is no fixed schedule for students. Every 4 weeks, their schedule changes as follows:
1 NEW TRIPLETTE (3 weeks) + 1 META WEEK
THE TRIPLETTE
A “Triplette” is a three-weeks cross-disciplinary course module with a unique name and theme. This theme sets the pace for the life of the class group that follows it for three weeks. Based on this theme, teachers from different subjects meet to discuss key points they will tackle in class with students in accordance with both the curriculum and Triplette’s theme.
We arrived on the first day of a new Triplette. The class group we observed were part of the “Light your lamp” Triplette. The final objective of this Triplette was to build a lamp. They therefore had a math lesson on triangles, to better understand the structure of the lamp they were going to build, as well as a physics lesson on electricity and technology. The clear objective set up at the beginning of the Triplette helps students cultivate the desire to learn, as it links theoretical knowledge they learn in class to real life: in this case, building a lamp. Students can thus immediately see how they can use the knowledge they got from school. This cross-disciplinary approach makes it easier to tackle the complexity of today’s world, giving students all the tools they need to understand the many facets of a given problem.
Finally, the Triplette system is also an opportunity to encourage cooperation between teachers, who work together to develop the various course modules. They rarely teach together, but working on the same theme strengthens synergies between them and between subjects. It’s clear that this cooperation is beneficial, and we could observe that teachers are more willing to talk to each other about not only their difficulties, and their students’ but also their successes and good practices.
THE META WEEK
The “meta week” is about taking a step back from knowledge, working on methodology, and analysis. It’s important to help students comprehend what they’ve learned, consolidate their knowledge, and empower them to become independent learners.
LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT THE DIFFERENT ACTIVITIES THAT PONCTUATE A STUDENT LIFE AT LIRL
- Warm up activities enable students to start their day in peace, with an ice-breaker activity. This can involve reflecting together on what we saw the day before, talking about a current event, describing others with a compliment, listening to music, or meditating together…
- Modules: modules are courses organized by a teacher on the theme of the current Triplette. At the start of each course, the teacher sets up a main question that students should be able to answer by the end of the hour.
- Workshops are conducted in smaller groups of up to 15 students. These workshops may or may not revolve around the current Triplette theme. . Themes are wide and varied: language, writing/reading, physical sports, arts, sports, introduction to technology… They offer a unique opportunity to explore subjects that are not commonly covered in regular school curriculums. The workshops run for a duration of three weeks, similar to the Triplettes..
- GR stands for Homework Groups, which are supervised by teachers and made up of around fifteen students from different grades. The purpose of these groups is to encourage mutual support among students of different ages. Since the same group of people remains together for the entire year, they become an important part of a student’s academic journey. GR teachers provide ongoing support, methodological assistance, and coaching, creating a supportive and familial environment. Each GR has a “GR referent”, a student whose responsibility is to bring up any difficulty faced by their fellow group members. The GR referent also shares their ideas for the school at the LIRL council, the COLIRL, which takes place every Wednesday.
- Friday free project is an activity that puts students in project mode. Students are required to choose a project and commit to it. The project can be long-term (all year) or short-term (a few months), and it can be an existing project or a new one.
- Concluding workshop or concluding module: During this period, teachers assist students in organizing their learning through discussions, remedial sessions, and self-directed or guided study. This helps students better understand what they have learned and take a step back to reflect on their learning.
Workshops themes
- Plastic expression
- Dutch
- Theater & improvisation
- Reading and writing
- english
- Do It Yourself
- Philosophy
- singing
- History
- Maths
THE LEARNING JOURNAL
As the students have no set schedule from week to week, all their learning is organized in the famous learning journal: the ultimate tool of the LIRL teaching environment. It’s in every student’s binder, and is used at the start of the day to note the day’s schedule, then during the module to write the problem to tackle during the hour and then the answer. It is also used to ask a “meta” question at the end of each module or workshop, to take a step back from what has just happened (eg. : What is the most important thing in today’s lesson ? / What did I learn ?) . In short, the learning journal is key to structuring the Lycée Roger Lallemand’s innovative pedagogical approach.
LIRL principles put into practice
HAVE A CRITICAL EYE ON WHAT YOU LEARN
Taking a step back from what a student has learned is key at LIRL. At the end of each module, students are asked to reflect on what they have learned and what difficulties they have encountered. This enables them to take a reflective stance on their learning, to become masters of it and to make it more conscious.
Meta weeks are also an opportunity to analyze one’s schooling. It’s a special week, held once a month, during which students can help each other with questions of organization and methodology. The teachers become real coaches during this week.
At LIRL, we put a lot of emphasis on the students’ profession: they have to respect things on several levels: respect for the environment, their work, respect for others and openness to others. Every month, they have to fill in a behavioral self-assessment grid in which they are questioned about the organization of their work, non-violent communication, involvement in the group… They evaluate themselves in their practice of their profession as students, which enables them to constantly improve. Evaluation by peers or by the GR referent is also possible to create a real discussion around the student and his or her way of being a student.
This is also reflected in the assessment and grading system. At the end of the term, parents do not receive a report card, but rather detailed assessments in a portfolio. The portfolio is an essential part of a student’s life at LIRL, as it is the preferred tool for organizing independent work and self-evaluation. It reflects individual progress through a meticulous selection of achievements and works chosen by the student and/or teacher.
The portfolio breaks down as follows:
- Presentation of the student, personal description and vision of the school
- Learning: all the student’s achievements
- Evaluation: tests, assessments, observations by teachers, parents and the student himself, who must reflect on his proudest achievements and challenges each term.
BE PART OF THE COMMUNITY
LIRL believes that schools should train responsible citizens who participate in community life. To do so, the school has set up a system of participative democracy, enabling students to be the driving force behind important decisions. A referent is elected for each GR, and every Monday he or she organizes a debate within his or her group to raise issues of the moment: difficulties with a lesson, a teacher, the infrastructure, new projects, etc. On Wednesdays, all the GR referents meet with the people in charge of school management to make democratic decisions, which are then voted on before being adopted in the agora.
In addition to this participatory democracy, learning to live together is very important at LIRL. This can be seen with the mixing of students in different groups (GR groups, workshops, Triplettes) so that everyone gets to know each other, and in the organization of festive moments at the end of Triplettes to get together around activities in the schoolyard.
PROGRESS WITH AUTONOMY
As we saw earlier, LIRL is very much focused on the group and community aspect of the school, but what’s impressive is that the school does not neglect either the individual aspect and the development of student autonomy.
First and foremost, the school is a firm believer in differentiation: each student progresses at his or her own pace, and is given the best possible support to achieve this goal. “Each educational establishment enables each student to progress at his or her own pace at his or her own pace through formative assessment and differentiated teaching”. (art. 15 of the “Missions” decree)
To work on this autonomy, each student has to follow an independent work program, given every Monday and due at the end of the week. Students must therefore learn to organize their tasks to hand in everything on time. To do this, they have access to one-to-one help from a teacher during their GR hour, and they can also go to the teacher-organized lunch hours to get explained math, science or Dutch concepts, for example.
The school really adapts to students with special needs, with various arrangements in place. For example, they’ve invented a “foot elastic” for students who have difficulty concentrating, installed between the two front table legs so that they can stretch their legs anytime they need. What’s interesting here is that this is done without discriminating or pointing the finger at students with special needs: in the end, everyone wanted a “foot elastic”. Everything is done with gentleness and understanding.
Finally, student well-being and mental health are essential at LIRL, which is equipped with a listening center for young people, staffed by a psychologist directly inside the school.
In this way, LIRL strikes the right balance between group work, an emphasis on community, and individual follow-up, so that each student progresses at his or her own pace in the best possible conditions, without neglecting the community.
MAKE RESPONSIBLE CHOICES
Making choices is very important at LIRL in the sense that Tanguy, its director, explained to us that he was committed to training future adults. The ability to make choices is essential for a successful adult life, but it’s usually not taught in schools. LIRL tackles this issue, in particular with the Friday free project, as mathematics teacher Yann reminded us.
All students are required to take part in a free project, either by joining an existing project or creating a new one from scratch. The most important thing is to have a clear goal and work together as a group to achieve it. Some examples of free projects on Fridays: a bike repair workshop in the middle school, a film club, and a canteen for LIRL.
The Friday free projects focus on developing key skills for today’s world, such as project work, group work, adaptability, rigor, and decision-making ability, among others. Working on a project-based basis, students make choices on several levels: firstly, in choosing the type of project they’d like to take part in, but also throughout the whole project management process.
OUR CLASSES OBSERVATIONS
In the previous sections, we saw how the structure of learning at LIRL was innovative. Now let’s take a closer look and see, at a more “micro” level, how the teachers’ pedagogical practices in the classroom are new and inventive.
First: the teacher’s posture is unique. In France, there’s a certain distance between the student and the teacher. At LIRL, teachers are referred to as “members of the educational team”, and teachers and students are on first-name terms, speaking to each other almost as equals. This can also be seen with the fact that the member of the educational team is not seen as a know-it-all. In the science class we observed, for example, Marine would say, “I think that’s it, but I can do some further research to give you a more precise answer.” Also, decisions are made together in the classroom, to empower students. Indeed, the imperative replaces the indicative mode: for example, the technology teacher wouldn’t say “stand over there!” but rather “maybe we can stand on the middle table if that’s okay with you”.
Overall, students are more involved in lessons, both through the organization of the classrooms (see pictures below) and through pedagogical practices. During the DIY workshop, for example, the teacher gave each pupil a precise role, in order to involve them as much as possible during the course, and to ensure that they didn’t get lost in the shuffle. We also saw during this lesson that communication between teachers was effective, as the technology teacher reminded students of their morning geometry lesson on triangles.
A few limitations, however: during our observations, we found the classes very dissipated: the students are certainly involved, but sometimes the noise level makes concentration very difficult, which is perhaps not adapted to all students. We were also very surprised by the level of familiarity between teachers and students: check, very familiar words… Finally, some students said they really liked their college, but deplored its lack of organization. Indeed, the complexity and novelty of LIRL’s learning methods make the overall organization rather difficult, for a school with so many students.
Lycée Intégral roger lallemand, from the schoolyard
Example of the auto co-evaluation of a student
The agora, where colirl take place
Creative synthesis of a module about climate change
SITTING PLANS
End-of-triplette project about climate change
ARTICLE WRITTEN BY CLEMENTINE DUNGLAS
On the 12/26/2023
The tension between innovation and curricula
After describing what studying at LIRL feels like, we can say that the main issue for this type of new middle schools trying to teach differently is the ubiquitous tension between the desire to use alternative teaching methods and the need to prepare for national exams.
On this point, Tanguy explained that parents and even students are really focused on the preparation of these national exams. LIRL of course, abides by the national the curriculum: preparing their modules, teachers make sure that they don’t miss any notion. They even begin by reading the curriculum and try then to find innovative themes and ways of teaching to respect it.
However, as a result, the school may not be as innovative and disruptive as it was supposed to be in the first place. As an example, Freinet pedagogy teachers came to see the school and thought the school looked too much like classic schools. Even the education ministry encourages the school to be more flexible on the respect of the curricula, but becoming an innovative school takes time, you can’t do everything at the same time, you have to make choices and evolve step by step. Tanguy for instance said that he wants the school to better tackle subjects like differentiation and transdisciplinarity.
BYE BYE LIRL !
What inspired us
Establish effective communication channels to ensure that important information is passed on smoothly and that school life and student progress are constantly improved (school council, GR, communication between teachers, etc.).
Rituals that punctuate students’ lives: students don’t have a fixed timetable, but rituals keep their work organized. They are used to these rituals (student councils, free projects, warm up activities), and tools (learning journal and portfolio). They help them to keep track of what has been done and what remains to be done.
Assessment practices : students are given an end-of-term assessment based on mental and pedagogical behavior criteria, but there are no grades. Self-assessment is also widely used to involve students in their learning. This is all the more important given a study carried out at …. which reported that the most important criterion for student progress at school is feedback (ahead of class size, for example).
Key words
Active Pedagogy
Citizenship
Autonomy
Group-work
Communication
New tools
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