April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

Effects of RCKI principle-based pedagogical patterns as a pedagogical development
approach
Based on the work with the 3 schools, we have identified and distilled these principle-based pedagogical patterns. In
working with new teachers or new schools, we would like to explore the use of these patterns by new teachers. In the
middle of 2010, a new secondary school joined our project to adopt and use GS in their CL2 lessons. Before the
teachers conducted formal GS lessons, we conducted 4 rounds of professional development in which RCKI
principles and its related pedagogical patterns were introduced to our new Chinese language teacher, Carol. She had
approximately 10 years of teaching experience, but she was new to the use of GS. While she had a strong desire to
use ICT in teaching, she lacked the capability and the confidence on how to do it well. Like most Chinese language
teachers, she mainly adopted the drill-and-practice approach in her teaching. In class, Carol and her students spent
most of classroom time doing two things: deciphering linguistic forms and meanings at the word and sentence level,
and understanding the context of a given text. Reading comprehension was usually accomplished through teachercentered
explanations.
After sharing with her a number of past lessons which incorporated the principle-based pedagogical patterns, we
asked Carol to choose the patterns to adopt by herself, and helped her transform her lesson ideas into GS activities.
Within half a year, Carol had co-designed with us and implemented 7 GS lessons (each per week) for a Secondary 1
(Grade 7) class. The patterns she used include multimodal expression pattern and idea diversity pattern for teaching
writing, and spontaneous participation pattern for teaching Chinese new words and phrases. Carol designed and
implemented concrete lessons creatively on the basis of these patterns. For instance, while addressing the
aforementioned patterns of improvable ideas and symmetric knowledge advancement for teaching reading
comprehension, Carol designed and carried out the activity which comprises 1) reading the article; 2) generating
questions; 3) addressing questions; 4) judging the answers and 5) explaining.
Figure 7. Public board for the whole class in Carol’s class
The students were asked to read a text article entitled “Be prepared for danger in times of safety and security” within
the given time. Similarly, each group was given 20 minutes to compose text comprehension questions. She asked
each individual student to post his/her questions on the public board of each group within 8 minutes. Then she asked
each group to select out the questions that deserve further discussion in the rest 12 minutes. Specifying individual
work to be done within 8 minutes deliberately encourages each student to spontaneously and concurrently participate
in the group discussion. In this sequence, every student was expected to represent his/her ideas visually to pave a
path for the further improvement of his/her ideas. Group discussion otherwise is often dominated by students with
comparatively higher Chinese language ability. After that, groups worked in pairs, and each group addressed
questions and judged answers that were provided by its pair group. The design of the final step was slightly altered.
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