Pedagogical Patterns is an effort to instrumentalize general instructional methods. You take a method, give it a name which creates a metaphor (like for instance “Early bird”: teaching the most important topics first), write down its rules and usage, and place it in catalog of similar instructional methods. When as the teacher og intructional designer you are, you have a given subject matter you have to teach to a given target group, you have a mental model of the different pedagogical patterns and can deliberately choose which pedagogic pattern fits your situation.

This idea of describing patterns for learning, is influenced by the use of patterns in softwaredevelopment. I am not sure they work though. Allthough I like the idea, and I cherish the use of them as a software developer, I am actually a bit sceptical about the pedagogical patterns I’ve seen so far. Or rather the desciption of them. Because among the once I’ve seen, so few reach a level of abstraction that makes them suitable for different scenarios. Often they are written with a particular subject in mind (computer science) , and for a particular target group (university students). Most of them take for granted that pedagogical activity is exclusive to classroom based teaching. We need to step back two or three levels of abstraction, to describe universally applicable pedagogical patterns . Software Patterns for buiding software, Pedagical Patterns for building knowledge.
Somebody have to make some pedagogical super patters that are even more general than the ones written so far. And a very interesting parallel assignment would be to make a collection of pedagogical e-learning patterns.