Session T4A 0-7803-7961-6/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE November 5-8, 2003, Boulder, CO 33 rd ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T4A-2 APPLYING AND DEVELOPING PATTERNS IN TEACHING Jens Bennedsen 1 and Ole Eriksen 2 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark, jbb@daimi.au.dk 2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalborg University Esbjerg, Denmark, oe@cs.aue.auc.dk Abstract - A community of teachers and researchers within computer science has adopted the idea of patterns and developed a set of pedagogical patterns. These patterns capture best practices in teaching. From our research and teaching practice we have observed that pedagogical patterns are useful, but there is a need for concepts and tools to justify and analyse the patterns. In every teaching community there exists a set of values characterizing what good teaching is about. Patterns may be measured by stating which values they imply and to what degree. Considering them as value based patterns in teaching will enrich the notion of pedagogical patterns. Inspired by conditions for learning we identify three values in teaching in the field of engineering-related educations. Further we present a value-based template for guidelines in teaching, causing a better understanding of the patterns and help teachers to develop, apply and communicate patterns. Index Terms – Pedagogical patterns, teaching program- ming, constructive learning, teaching values. INTRODUCTION Christopher Alexander says, " Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice"[1]. Even though Alexander was talking about patterns in buildings and towns, what he says might be true about teaching. The notion of patterns is adopted with great success in object-oriented software design [8] as well as in process-oriented fields such as organization [7] and project management [5]. Patterns in the areas mentioned concern abstraction, reuse and communication. It is a highly stimulating challenge trying to extract a general solution, from a concrete successful work, in order to reuse the solution. Furthermore, there seems to be a great variation in how solutions are described, in order to communicate them. The patterns in object-oriented software development, organization and project management are described in very different ways; it seems to be the case that the pattern language is of great influence of the area. The purpose of our research, which is documented in this article, is therefore to identify conditions that have to exist before patterns can be used in teaching as well as defining a template for pedagogical patterns stimulating teachers to develop, apply and communicate patterns effectively. PEDAGOGICAL PATTERNS In the following we briefly introduce the concept of pedagogical patterns and the current state of the pedagogical patterns project. The idea of the pedagogical pattern project is to write, in a uniform way, solutions to common problems in teaching object oriented programming. The pedagogical pattern project can be found at [2]. Definition of pedagogical patterns In [2] the concept pedagogical pattern is defined as follows: “Patterns are designed to capture best practice in a specific domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning. The intent is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge. In essence a pattern solves a problem. This problem should be one that recurs in different contexts. In teaching we have many problems such as motivating students, choosing and sequencing materials, evaluating students, and the like...” The description of patterns is based on a template, so the reader of the patterns is familiar with the form and easily finds the specific information needed. Therefore it is important; that the template is chosen with care and all aspects of the concept is taken into consideration. In [2] the template contains, among other the following elements: - PROBLEM / ISSUE: problem, challenge, or issue that the pattern is addressing - AUDIENCE / CONTEXT: For what type of learners, in what context, is this pattern appropriate? - FORCES: What makes the problem a problem? - SOLUTION: the solution this pattern proposes to the problem - DISCUSSION: resulting content/consequences and implementation issues Below two pedagogical patterns are extracted from the original description from [3]. They are described by some of the above-mentioned elements from the template. After a discussion of the foundation of pedagogical patterns in the