The digital transformation places new demands on our teachers. Switzerland aims to provide them with the necessary competences, some inspiration comes from the EU.
A look at the Swiss cantons points to the fact that the digital transformation / digitisation has undoubtedly become a pace-setter in education. According to Marius Beerli, Commissioner for Digitisation at the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK/CDIP/CDPE), the cantons’ education policy initiatives show that extensive digitisation programmes for schools are underway. The IT education offensive of the Canton of St. Gallen is an example of such initiatives with 75 million Swiss francs made available for the programme. Not only the Swiss but also the EU educational context launched different projects to keep up with the changes. The Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) from the European Commission presents various initiatives and resources to get one step closer to the European Education Area.
In the French-speaking part of Switzerland, an intercantonal collaboration was set up to develop a digital competences reference framework for teachers. It all started within the context of the CIIP’s digital strategy (Intercantonal Conference on Public Education in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino) and its digital commission CONUM. The objective of this working group is to harmonise digital resources and services within French speaking cantons by providing a common curriculum platform with access to official educational resources and textbooks and by developing students’s and teachers’ digital skills and competences. The CIIP, via the CAHR (Academic Council of French-speaking universities in charge of teacher training) mandated representatives of teacher training institutions such as the HEP Vaud, in collaboration with the LEARN centre at EPFL HEP BEJUNE, HEP Fribourg with CERF, HEFP, HEP Valais and the University of Geneva in order to develop a digital competence framework for teachers.
A working group was created with the following goal: to define the digital competences which are expected of teachers from different schooling levels. First, however, a common ground had to be found. Julien Clénin, former vice-rector of the Haute École Pédagogique BEJUNE and chair of the working group, explains that some institutions, in particular the canton of Fribourg, were already making extensive use of the the European HEP Bejune Commission’s Digital Competence of Educators framework (DigCompEdu) and had adapted it to their curriculum. The DigCompEdu serves as a guide for the development of national, regional, and local education programmes in the area of digital skills. It is structured in six different competence areas: i. Professional Engagement, ii. Digital Resources, iii. Teaching and Learning, iv. Assessment, v. Empowering Learners, vi. Facilitating Learners’ Digital Competence; and details 22 educator-specific digital competences. Each competence is broken down into 6 levels very much like the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. To better understand the framework itself, the CIIP working group contacted one of the minds behind the document, Anastasia Economou from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and project manager of DigCompEdu. “It was important for the working group to understand where the framework came from, how it was built, why and how it was developed”, Clénin highlights.
The next step was to develop a Swiss version of DigCompEdu that would be adapted to the French speaking context and curricula and to the current digital context. Since the first version focused on compulsory school teachers, the French-speaking Canton’s joint curriculum, Plan d’étude romand (PER), had a major role to play. The curriculum’s digital education area represents the basis with which the DigCompEdu was adapted as Stephanie Burton, project manager for digital education at HEP BEJUNE and lecturer at HEP Vaud, explains: “the students’ curriculum has to be reflected in the document even if the document goes way beyond.” The teachers’ expected competences are therefore based on those of the students. “Teachers have to be able to do what the students do”, Clénin laughs. Another influence comes from current trends and requirements from the cantonal digital strategies. On the one hand, media education topics such as disinformation and media analysis and production have a long tradition in the French speaking area and therefore play a more prominent role in the Swiss framework than in the original DigCompEdu. On the other hand, there are always hot digital topics shaping education. “At this point in time, areas of great interest are Green IT (how to develop a durable digital strategy for schools), data protection and recent development in artificial intelligence”, Burton illustrates, “A few years ago, there was a lot of interest in video games and gamification in education.” The aim is therefore to weigh the different influences and changing demands and integrate them into a sustainable competence framework for teachers. “It’s really the challenge and the art at the same time”, Clénin points out.
Even if DigCompEdu is a policy tool with a lot of potential for education in Switzerland and the EU, its full implementation into practice will be a challenge for institutions of teacher education. Stephanie Burton sees great potential in training teachers to use the data made available by platforms and personalised online exercises such as Lalilo to better understand and monitor students’ learning processes, or to use digital tools to increase the autonomy of students with special needs such as dyslexia for example. However, she also takes on a more realistic perspective, “the problem at this point in time is the discrepancy between a very ambitious framework, which still needs to be broken down into levels to serve as a basis for a self-evaluation tool and the competence level of many teachers.” Before tackling more ambitious areas of DigCompEdu, the priority is assuring the basics. “Right now, we are training teachers to make productive use of the new cloud tools and platforms deployed in schools and to implement the curriculum, in particular the new areas of computational thinking, educational robotics, etc.”, she continues. In addition, the time constraint due to teachers’ workload does not facilitate the implementation of the adapted reference framework. “At this point in time, our training programmes cannot focus enough on more advanced skills, such as classroom management in one to one settings or using digital tools to develop more creative, and differentiated learning scenarios or thematising the societal and ethical changes related to digitisation, such as information (and disinformation) management, critical thinking or attention management”, Burton explains. The lack of time for training is not only observed in Switzerland but also on the EU level, where it was discussed, for instance, during the 2023 edition of the School Innovation Forum (see SwissCore article).
However, the competence framework remains important as a common point of reference for teachers’ digital skills. The influence of the European reference framework has thereby not been limited to compulsory school education in French-speaking Switzerland, but was also adapted at a later stage in the context of upper secondary education as well as for the training of pedagogical advisors. Another positive outcome of DigCompEdu was the strengthening of cooperation between the French speaking cantons. “This is the first time we’ve worked together on a teacher competence reference framework. We’ve never had anything like it before, and that’s the innovative aspect of this project”, Clénin explains. How all these versions of the framework are going to be applied, is at the end up to the educational regions. “Now, it’s all going to depend on the cantons and teacher training institutions”, Stephanie Burton sums it up well.
To conclude, this success story has taken on a slightly different format from the others. We looked at a tool developed at the EU level which served as an inspiration for an important reference document shaping the future digital skills of French-speaking teachers in Switzerland. One educational context was able to learn something from the other, which, however, does not have to remain one-sided. The Swiss contribution can provide insight into how a competence framework can be transformed and applied in practice, and what challenges and new opportunities arise in the process.