April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

During the last 20 minutes, each group selected the best question and posted it onto the public board for the whole
class sharing (see above Figure 6). Carol gave instructions that each group was to select not only the best question
(instead of the question with the lowest score) but also its related answers to share (see Figure 7). The teacher had
deemed it difficult for students at grade 9 to judge the quality of questions, but proposed that selecting the question in
which they were interested and sharing their answers towards the question seemed more productive for the students.
In this way, the teacher brought to the fore for class discussion students’ (potential) comprehension of the solution,
evidenced through their concrete artifacts. Thus teacher’s role is more than coordinating the process of group work,
but is to find coherence with the different students’ answers and observations (Pata, Sarapuu, Lehtinen, 2005).
In a semi-structured interview with Carol, she shared:
Initially I do not really understand how to go about designing the activity. After all, there is some technicality
involved. … I have read the principle of using GS. That’s it. I was just reading. In the end I’d still have to
implement them. I have only read and understood the principle theoretically. Between understanding and
applying them in classroom, there is still some distance to cover.
Carol said that she became more confident of conducting the GS lesson using these principle-based pedagogical
patterns. She mentioned that she derived a better understanding of collaborative activity design and RCKI, and she
felt that she had internalized them.
Discussion and conclusion
The design and enactment of collaborative activities in a networked classroom environment is a very complex
process that has to take into account a multitude of factors. One way to start is to expose teachers to best practices,
either written or as depicted on videos. Patterns make pragmatic resources more accessible to practitioners (Mor et
al., 2006) by encapsulating the knowledge from experts and experienced teachers in a form which is transferable and
applicable to similar classroom situations. However, some studies have suggested that innovation of teaching
practices are intertwined with teacher beliefs (Chen, Looi, & Chen, 2010; Jacobson, et al., 2010). If a teacher cannot
understand the essence of design behind pedagogical patterns, s/he can only emulate a similar process of activity, but
the efficacy of pedagogical patterns may not be fully unlocked. An approach based on starting from principles has
been postulated to help teachers to internalize an innovative mindset (Zhang & Scardamalia, 2007). The principlebased
approach can engage teachers in reflective interpretation and in making adaptive classroom decisions to
orchestrate the classroom activities well. But it is always a challenge for teachers to comprehend such principles
especially when they appear to be rather abstract or de-contextualized. Grounding teachers with principle-based
pedagogical patterns, hence create a focus for the teachers to start with but to lead eventually for them to understand
the principles behind the pedagogical patterns.
In this study we propose that principle-based pedagogical patterns, used in conjunction with classroom network
technologies, have the potential to advance pedagogical knowledge of classroom practices and help teacher
understand abstract principles and address major challenge to effective use of technologies. Towards L2 learning in
GS-based networked environment, we articulate 9 pedagogical patterns categorized and undergirded by RCKI
principles. They inform the pedagogical design of CSCL activities taking account of the characteristics and
requirements of language learning in a networked classroom environment.
We share our preliminary findings concerning one teacher from a local secondary school who has done an uptake of
the pedagogical patterns which were developed and identified from earlier work with other schools and teachers. Our
approach to having the teacher understand and apply the principle-based pedagogical patterns is via professional
development. Much time and effort is invested in such efforts and in co-designing lessons with our teacher. Future
research studies should be concerned with how often and reliably our teachers can integrate these patterns in their
own activity design with the researchers as a support structure and also without the researchers after the latter leaves
the school. We will work on encouraging teachers to use the common language in pedagogical patterns for
describing their new but effective practices.
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