Daniel Gostain, an educator, and Jacques Marpeau, a doctor in education, explain that the approach of exploration and elaboration allows students to exercise their "freedom of thought." Every other Thursday, they analyze certain concepts to open discussions and highlight the implications of their use. Today, the word "elaboration." At the biological level, elaboration refers to the physical and chemical action by which beings transform external substances into forms assimilable into their vital organic functions. At the intellectual level, elaboration denotes a personal or collective thought process, profound and autonomous. It is a "personal assimilation" that may be modest and limited to a "thought object" or be the work of a lifetime. Scientific research, artistic creation, and the invention of tools or methods result from an elaboration process. A student is the originator of their elaborations, while they receive, accept, or are forced to integrate what they are required to learn. Elaboration is a work of thinking that integrates the perceptions of the body and mind, along with the atmosphere and relationships experienced in the classroom. It is the process from resources and the meaning felt and experienced by the student seeking to understand. Elaboration resides in the creation of a personal understanding of what structures a question, a situation, an event, or a context, where learning proposes the acquisition and application of known and existing understanding keys. Faced with the unknown, doubt, and the absence of references, the human being is confronted with their own mode of apprehension, allowing them to "find their way" based on the indicators they perceive. There is a transition from a codified and transmitted understanding of teaching to a comprehension constructed from what animates and mobilizes students seeking to understand. Elaboration arises from the consciousness and anxiety of having to position oneself to exist as a student within the established framework of teaching. There is no need to elaborate a new understanding of what is usual and "normal." It is situations of tension, even crisis, for which we do not possess understanding keys, that call for elaboration work. Crisis is "a moment between two" where what was known is no longer possible and what will be is not yet. A new element has changed the understanding of the balance of a whole. There is a transition from a stable state to a state of disorganization opening up to another balance to create. "Acknowledging" a lost balance is necessary for the elaboration of a questioning of what is known, to access a completely different understanding. Beyond the understanding work required by a course question, elaboration is the implementation of a self-transformation. It is about the student opening up to another meaning, previously unknown to them. Elaboration begins with an inquiry that breaks through. It forces the student to a "unlearning" of what they know and think usually. It is a questioning of their positioning and not just their knowledge. It is about them "building meaning," positioning themselves, and trying to understand what is happening within and around them, even when they "feel lost and can't find their way." In the elaboration work, the student, who must reconsider their acquisitions and knowledge, is shaken in their certainties, perceptions, feelings, and affiliations. Elaboration is a work of traversing uncertainty that requires self-esteem and self-confidence. To become a thinking subject, a student needs more than accumulating knowledge or opening their mind to different understanding modes of knowledge disciplines. It is not sufficient for them to submit to learning procedures. They need to exercise their thinking in the elaboration work. They need to become capable of summoning themselves a theoretical reference or experience allowing them an intelligibility, interpretation, or reading possibly relevant among the different understanding modes of a single question or situation. The acquisitions of knowledge, for as indispensable as they are, are only tools in the elaboration work of their thinking, so they can build a "lived" and personal understanding of the situations in which they interact. One cannot teach or learn elaboration, but a student can be "put" and "put themselves" into elaboration work. Teaching, by its necessity of functional collective efficiency, calls for memorization and reproduction of the gesture, formula, or notion that must be "learned," then applied with relevance. It does not allow the exercise of the heuristic and creative function of elaboration. This aims for the student to construct themselves, personally or within a group, a schema of what happens in a lived or studied situation. It is about formulating a comprehension key transferable to other situations. It is not just the "laws" that are assimilated. It is also their mode of construction that is part of the student's or collective understanding. That is why they are transferable to future and unknown situations calling for a thinking work by elaboration. A "pedagogy of thought" requires the experimentation of processes for the elaboration of a personal understanding, regarding a new knowledge, then the transfer of this mode of understanding to other situations and "knowledge objects." It is about detaching the permanent principles in the form of "schema" of synthetic mental representation, making it possible to use them in different contexts. Making students experience the exploration and elaboration approach is to move away from a pedagogy of submission to the thinking modes of taught disciplines. It allows students to exercise their "freedom of thought" in an exploration and elaboration approach within knowledge disciplines. Elaboration requires the experimentation of rigor. The rigor of thought is not given, it is constructed. It resides in an exactness, precision, accuracy, and relevance concerning what is studied. It is also a requirement of truth in what is proven, experienced, and subjected to the test of transferability. The rigor of thought cannot be satisfied by opinion, evidence, approximation, or the plausible. Reconsidering the place of elaboration in the thinking work of students is to give a strong meaning to school and learning by embedding them in a dynamic of investment in what has value in the eyes of each student. It is to place procedures and devices in their role as means at the service of children and young people emerging as subjects, authors of their own mode of understanding their place in the city, the world, and what they can do and be there. It is to make them experience that regardless of their current difficulties, through their elaboration work, they will be the authors and not just the "executing agents." Why is the term "elaboration" so little used today? I think it is not used because we are in a society whose ideal is mastery, where we need the answer when we have the question. We are in a society that solves problems and refuses to think about problematic situations for which we do not have immediate answers that remain to be elaborated. We are in an education that is vertical, where we already know what the student must learn. We do not solicit the thinking work that is first an experimental trial work of the same nature as a researcher. We think that research is for people who have reached the end of the intellectual circuit, which is absurd because the child begins with this elaboration work, that is, they discover the world while building capacities. It is only necessary to look at how one accesses walking and how one accesses language. However, we want to learn, that is: "You will put one foot in front of the other and stand straight." This is not how a child learns. They learn by playing. We do not want to allow the child to discover life. Is uncertainty, so necessary for elaboration, present in school? Here, the concept of journey is at stake: learning to make one's way, while we are in learning procedures in which the path is already laid out and where everyone must take the same path. School operates on the assumption of structural acquisition prerequisites (what structures the personality of each individual) already constructed, stating that it is the family's responsibility to build them. With the abandonment of childhood, there will be more and more students who will not be able to perform the first required gestures by school, those of discovering the world, notably in preschool. Therefore, it is necessary to reconsider the place given to trial and uncertainty in learning. Uncertainty is the letting go of the father or mother, who moves away from the child and extends their arms. The child will probably not fall because they are reaching out for the welcome.