Balancing between Personal and Collaborative Learning Processes

The nature of vocational education needs has changed. In authentic vocational classroom contexts, there is a rising need to develop new ways to integrate ongoing and overlapping processes of students’ personal learning environments and collaborative knowledge construction. However, there is currently very little knowledge about how teachers integrate these two approaches in arranging learning. This creates new challenges for teachers when creating instructional activities, especially regarding teacher-student interactions. This case study illuminates teachers’ instructional activities in empowering the students’ knowledge construction in a technology-enhanced learning setting. The results showed six main teacher-student interactions related to orchestrating learning. In addition, this study illustrates how vocational education teachers enhance students’ learning in ways that meet working life needs (e.g., by selectively restructuring knowledge from the viewpoint of work settings). Classroom Orchestration: Balancing between Personal and Collaborative Learning Processes