Orchestration in a networked classroom: Where the teacher's real-time enactment matters
Introduction
From a social constructivist perspective, the teacher's role is one of orchestrating a range of activities that lead to knowledge creation rather than a knowledge provider transmitting information to students (Beauchamp, Kennewell, Tanner, & Jones, 2010; Dillenbourg, Järvelä, & Fischer, 2009). According to Dillenbourg (2012), orchestration refers to the real time management of multi-layered activities and multiple constraints; it expands instructional design to cope with what he calls extrinsic activities and constraints. The author calls for design for orchestration as a means of traction for impacting educational practices in schools.
Dillenbourg presents four learning environments to illustrate the teacher's role of orchestration in regulating various activities (emergent, envelope, extraneous and infra) and constraints around the core activities. Indeed, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is embedded in social context which includes complex factors. Different core activity learning designs require different pedagogies and affordances of collaborative technologies, hence contribute to different activities and constraints. This, in turn, requires different ways of orchestration that bring out the real-time adaptive yet effective enactment of activities leading to desirable processes and outcomes.
In designing for orchestration, we emphasize the criticality of the teacher's agency, skills and their understanding of pedagogies and collaborative technologies in orchestrating the classroom beyond the provision of material scripts and technologies used for orchestration – an issue which is not well developed in Dillenbourg's position paper. This draws on our experiences with supporting teachers to run collaborative classrooms and mobile learning classrooms in Singapore (Looi, So, Toh, & Chen, 2011; Looi, Zhang, Chen, Seow, & Chia, 2011). In this short response, we will use some data from the collaborative classrooms supported by a collaborative technology called GroupScribbles (GS), to make our argument. We first present our core design, pedagogy and affordances of the GS collaborative technology, followed by the design for orchestration of the activities and constraints that expand this intended core design.
Section snippets
Core design of a collaborative classroom
Our core design is concerned with progressive inquiry supported by GS. The progressive inquiry approach is proposed by Hakkarainen (2003) for young learners' knowledge creation in a CSCL environment. Five principles are included in the core design, aiming at elucidating the processes and dynamics of collaborative inquiry and guiding the progressive inquiry pedagogical approach. The five principles are: (a) working on authentic problems, (b) encouraging diverse ideas, (c) making progressive
Affordances of collaborative technology – GroupScribbles
A typical GS classroom is equipped with an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB), and each student in the classroom has a Tablet PC with the GS client software installed (Fig. 1). GS allows students to create, publish and edit lightweight multimodal expressions (text, drawing, and painting) for group activities. The GS user interface presents each student with a two-paned window. The lower pane is an individual work area, or a private board, with a virtual pad of fresh scribble sheets of different
Design for orchestration in GS-supported progressive inquiry classrooms
Making use of the GS affordances, the teacher's orchestration of the inquiry class can be designed holistically at three levels: individual, group and whole class activities (see Fig. 2). (S)he can orchestrate the multiple level activities interchangeably according to the pedagogical goals enabled by GS. As GS provides the teacher with a bird's-eye view of the participation and performance of individual students and groups, it helps the teacher monitor the ongoing process and performance of the
References (8)
- et al.
Interactive whiteboards and all that jazz: the contribution of musical metaphors to the analysis of classroom activity with interactive technologies
Technology, Pedagogy and Education
(2010) Design for classroom orchestration
(2012, March)- et al.
The evolution of research on computer-supported collaborative learning
Progressive inquiry in a computer-supported biology class
Journal of Research in Science Teaching
(2003)
Cited by (19)
Effectiveness of the functions of classroom orchestration systems: A systematic review and meta-analysis
2023, Computers and EducationThe relationship between self-regulated student use of a virtual learning environment for algebra and student achievement: An examination of the role of teacher orchestration
2022, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :For example, Joyce-Gibbons (2014) found that students experienced greater rates of success when teachers used problematization utterances with students engaged in group problem solving tasks. Ultimately, the outcomes realized from teacher orchestration in a learning experience using technology are dependent on the teacher's beliefs, technological pedagogical content knowledge, and her knowledge of the students (Looi & Song, 2013). Efforts to foster the skills underlying effective orchestration have included overlay technology that stitches together components of a learning environment to provide increased awareness and decision support to the teacher, with the recognition that novice educators are likely to benefit from more supports than experienced teachers (Muñoz-Cristóbal et al., 2015).
Collaborative learning in mathematics classrooms: Can teachers understand progress of concurrent collaborating groups?
2021, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :We are aware that finding precise conditions that optimize orchestration is an impossible endeavor, though. As noticed by Looi and Song (2013), orchestration itself is unplannable: Orchestration depends on what is happening in real time classroom and how the teacher handles the dynamic environment, good pre-design can provide cues, structures and scaffolding to support and guide a teacher what to do. However, the list of types of alerts we proposed is rooted in experimental studies that show that, say, being too much off-task or that providing a final reasoned answer which is incorrect, is detrimental to learning.
Teacher regulation of multiple computer-supported collaborating groups
2015, Computers in Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :Another aspect of importance, both concerning diagnosing and intervening, was the way teachers shifted between individual, group and class level. Teachers continuously monitored and diagnosed the students’ activities, focusing their attention sometimes on the group level (by engaging in a conversation or observing a group’s progress), and other times on the class level again to make an announcement or to see whether any group or student needed additional help (Looi & Song, 2013). Multiple groups could be observed simultaneously in order to compare their progress.
Supporting teachers in guiding collaborating students: Effects of learning analytics in CSCL
2014, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :There is an ongoing discussion in the CSCL community about which point on the continuum of supporting tools is most effective (Roschelle, Dimitriadis, & Hoppe, 2013). Although the present study cannot settle the debate, it does show that no matter the technology, the teacher is the agent: the one who makes use of the technology and decides how and when to use it (Looi & Song, 2013). An unprecedented result is that there is no significant difference between the control and experimental condition concerning the focus on collaborative aspects.
Classroom orchestration: Synthesis
2013, Computers and EducationCitation Excerpt :On a hopeful note, several papers give examples of apparent orchestration success. Looi and Song (2013) describe how their research identified a fit between GroupScribbles and teacher's agency within their “progressive inquiry” pedagogical approach. Balaam (2013) describes the “Subtle Stone” as a very simple way to create more ambient awareness of emotional states.