D R A F T: All content in this section is in flux. Stable versions will be published in the outcomes section.

At Warwick the Institute of Education runs post-graduate courses in education (PGCEs) through which graduates become trained in teaching. During June and July 2006, 24 students on the programme specifically for secondary school teachers (12 to 16 year olds) in the UK system were contacted and invited to take part in the study. The Learning Patterns deployment questionnaire was distributed to these students and they were either filled in by hand within a session set aside during their course, or later via email. The participants were asked about their experience with games, the uses to which they put them in the classroom and their opinion as to the effectiveness of games in the classroom. The games Chancemaker and Juggler were distributed for specific feedback from the participants.

The responses were collated during the early part of August 2006 and specific patterns identified from the range of uses listed from the respondents. These were clustered into three main groupings – incidental learning, starter activities and independent studies. These patterns were further subdivided. Reflections on this process included:

·         the degree to which difference is tolerated within a pattern, before the difference actually constitutes two different patterns

·         should the groupings actually reflect the purposes of the deployment, for example are the intentions behind deploying plenary starters and parallel starters actually close enough to be grouped together as elaborations of the “starter” pattern?

·         should the subject content of the lesson be included as a specific instantiation of the pattern “incidental learning”, or included in the highest level pattern? The decision arrived at was that incidental learning in the types of games mentioned only happened with one particular subject area (use of number) so the group of  “incidental learning” patterns were taken to be “incidental learning of number”.

Transferring the data from the questionnaires also enabled missing data to be more readily identified. For example, once the decision had been made to differentiate between plenary and parallel starters, the template requires a rationale be offered for the pattern, and hence the question of whether these different deployment patterns arise from differing rationales.

Where the need to group and differentiate the deployment patterns required more information from the participants, or where the responses were not clear, the participants were contacted individually for more information.

An additional decision made was to include the management strategies that teachers employ in response to incidents within the classroom as a further elaboration of a pattern. I.e. one of the respondents stated that when she used games as a plenary starter, this sometimes gave rise to behavioural problems within the classroom, because the students became too excited. This gave rise to a further elaboration of plenary starter named “disrupted plenary starter”. The opinion was that deployment is likely to give rise to situations beyond the intention of the teacher/designer/researcher and that an important part of building up deployment patterns is that they should recognise, and offer solutions to, the emergent properties of classroom interactions.