Mind the Gaps: Using Patterns to Change Everyday Classroom Practice Towards Contingent CSCL Teaching

Abstract

Educational research has established the benefits of adapting lesson plans and teaching to the evolution of student knowledge and emergent occurrences in the classroom. This kind of improvisatory adaptation of teaching, however, is seldom seen in everyday classroom practice of CSCL. This paper describes two independent research projects that aim to influence authentic classroom practices to promote this kind of teaching using the same collaborative learning tool, Group Scribbles. Evidence from both projects shows that merely providing technologies that support this adaptation is not enough to provoke the change and that exposing teachers to good uses of the tool (in the form of pedagogical patterns) also has limited success. Both projects highlight the difficulty for practitioners to bridge the gap between de-contextualized advice and contextualized classroom situations. We propose the use of more atomic, actionable moves to help teachers orchestrate technology to support deeper collaborative knowledge building.