Between differentiated instruction and open education: the work plan (plan de travail) as an educational device to address everyone's needs. a survey of teachers' and pupils’ perspectives

The work plan is an educational tool from Freinet’s institutional pedagogy (1962), now actualized by the Movement for Cooperation in Education (MCE) in Italy. It consists of a list of personalized, differentiated and multidisciplinary tasks that must be completed independently or with peers within a specified time frame (Connac, 2009). The device traces back to the investigation of universality and speciality in the teachinglearning process. That involves, on the one side, according to Vermee (2010) and Demo & Seitz (2021), respecting and valuing everyone's differences and needs, personalizing learning, and, on the other, facilitating participation and a sense of belonging for all, as elaborated by Ianes & Demo (2023). This paper is part of a broader research framework that has developed two important theoretical constructs: the Differentiated Instruction (Tomlinson, 1999; 2006; 2022), a way of designing the teaching process that offers different ways, contents and timings to answer to the needs of the pupils, and the Open Education (Demo, 2016), that allows for student initiatives, enabling them to choose, self-organize, self-regulate, self-determine and fully participate. The research involved teachers, who proposed the work plan to three classes of fourth-grade primary school over a period of four months. The aim of the research was to support teachers in a process of didactic innovation; during this presentation, the results from the process of recording and analysing the experimentation of the tool will be presented in terms of the satisfaction of the teachers and pupils involved, the effectiveness on learning and on the development of transversal skills. The presentation will propose an analysis, in the light of the data collected through interviews and questionnaires, on the increase in pupils' organisational skills and autonomy, their development of awareness of their own learning styles and the ability acquired by teachers to reflect on their teaching choices, with particular attention to the inclusive dimension.