There was a moment in Vincent Martin‘s recent webinar at Université de Sherbrooke where the mathematics didactics professor admitted something academics rarely say aloud: for over a decade, he’d been doing his work “dans une posture déficitaire” — documenting everything wrong with how probability gets taught, without helping to shift it.
For those of us working inside the MEQ Education Program, that admission lands hard.
Probability isn’t optional in Québec. The Progression of Learning expects students to move from predicting outcomes and comparing probabilities qualitatively in Cycle 1 toward enumerating possibilities and expressing probability with fractions by Cycle 3. The program implicitly draws on three approaches — theoretical, frequentist, and subjective. That’s the program on paper. Martin’s research asked what happens when it meets the classroom.
His survey of 626 teachers found they feel less confident teaching probability than any other math domain — many consider it the hardest to teach. Then he analyzed 1,315 probability tasks across eight Québec textbooks and workbooks. The findings should give every consultant pause: probability makes up only about 5% of math tasks, and of those, roughly 85% at primary lean almost entirely on the theoretical approach. The frequentist and subjective work the Progression calls for barely registers in the materials.
This is the “agentivité didactique” problem in plain view. The Program asks for one thing, yet the resources we hand teachers point somewhere else. Then Martin’s talk pivots. Reading Benoit and Stetsenko, he asked himself:
Is it enough to document the world without contributing to its transformation, especially when that world is stuck in an intolerable status quo?
He decided it wasn’t — and started building with teachers rather than for them.
Two projects show this shift. First, a trilogy of “choose your own adventure” probability stories, one per cycle: assembling a robot across four planets (Cycle 1), planning M. Aléa’s daughter’s birthday (Cycle 2), competing in the “Probalympic Games” (Cycle 3). Each is a branching situational problem. Tested with 256 students over three years, erroneous reasoning faded — “I’ll win because I’m lucky” essentially disappeared by the third story — while reasoning from favorable cases and class results grew.
Second, Martin worked with a teacher, who started out honest: she rarely taught probability and lacked confidence. A profile familiar to anyone running PD across our boards. Over three cycles, she moved to designing causeries mathematics around everyday situations — which checkout line to choose — and had students placing probabilities on a scale, work aligned squarely with the Cycle 2–3 Progression of Learning.
What changed wasn’t her knowledge of the program. It was her capacity to act within it.
The lesson for our nine english School Boards across Québec: the gap between the curriculum and classroom practice isn’t a teacher problem — it’s a resource problem. And cataloguing what’s broken has a ceiling. At some point you stop describing the status quo and start building alongside the people living inside it.
A posture worth borrowing.
