In a 2001 paper for SIGCSE,1 Joseph Bergin wrote:
A pattern is supposed to capture best practice in some domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching. [...] The intent [of pedagogical patterns] is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge. Presenting this information in a coherent and accessible form can mean the difference between every new instructor needing to relearn what is known by senior faculty and easy transference of knowledge of teaching within the community.
Mitchell Weisburgh proposed nine aspects to documenting a pedagogical pattern for a certain skill.2 Not every pattern needs to include all nine. His listing is reproduced below:
Bergin, Joseph (March 2001). "A pattern language for initial course design". Proceedings of the Thirty-Second SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Volume 33, Issue 1). SIGCSE '01. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 282–286 [282]. doi:10.1145/364447.364602. ISBN 9781581133295. OCLC 51305304. S2CID 564766. 9781581133295 ↩
Weisburgh, Mitchell. "Documenting good education and training practices through design patterns". IEEE. Archived from the original on 2014-08-15. Retrieved 2007-10-17. https://web.archive.org/web/20140815031631/http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss_june2004.html ↩