Building communities of inquiry for student teachers: A pedagogical perspective

This chapter reports a case study on a teaching development grant (TDG) project that aimed to foster student teachers' ability to perform collaborative problem-solving in two teacher education courses delivered in a full online teaching mode during the COVID-19 pandemic. The community of inquiry framework and collaborative problem-solving pedagogy informed the design and facilitation of collaborative problem-solving tasks. Purposive design of such tasks entailed the course lecturers' use of positive teaching presence (teachers' design and facilitation of group tasks to cultivate students' collaborative problem-solving skills) and social presence (students' social interaction focusing on disciplinary problems) to promote cognitive presence (students' higher-order learning through creating collaborative problem-solving artifacts and peer critiquing of the artifacts). To explore the research question (To what extent can the use of collaborative problem-solving pedagogy support the construction and maintenance of communities of inquiry?), we present a critical analysis of relevant research literature themes as well as the core task design and facilitation features and typical examples of completed tasks and peer critiques by student teachers in this case study. Based on the analysis, this chapter suggests that collaborative problem-solving is a viable pedagogy for constructing and sustaining communities of inquiry in teacher education and other higher education disciplines. Further, this case study has demonstrated the importance of peer critiquing in enhancing the quality of collaborative problem-solving artifacts, which is rarely explored in previous studies on communities of inquiry and thus warrants further investigation in the context of blended and online learning environments. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Wai Ho Yung and Huixuan Xu; individual chapters, the contributors.