Collins, Brown, Holum, 1991
From Eduwiki
Jennifer Reynolds Concise Summary
Apprenticeship is an old method of teaching that should be used again to teach metacognition. It serves as a model to help students learn how to solve problems and apply learned techniques to different situations.
Traditional apprenticeship offers many different ideas that will work well for cognitive learning, such as observation, scaffolding, increasingly independent practice, self-monitoring and correction skills and integrating knowledge and skills. It is useful for making thinking visible and more concrete for students. To teach cognitive apprenticeship, teachers need to identify the processes and make them visible, put abstract information into realistic and authentic contexts, and vary the diversity and similarity of situations to solve problems. This method is only useful for skill learning but is highly effective and engaging.
Cognitive apprenticeship applies mostly to learning skills, not fact. It is therefore best for reading, writing and math.
In reading, teachers can use reciprocal teaching to teach students, which as we know includes making questions based on the text, summarizing the text, making predictions, and clarifying difficulties.
In writing, teachers show that students need to spend time on planning and revising. They break down writing into generating a new idea, improving the idea, elaborating on the idea, identifying goals, and putting ideas into an organized writing assignment. This is done using prompts and the strategies that all three subjects share.
In math, teachers show students their own problem solving process by giving a think aloud. Here, they follow their basic steps to solve mathematical problems and show students how their thinking process works, eventually teaching the process to students. First they get a feel for the problem, make a statement, examine special cases, look at straightforward easy examples to calculate to find patterns, stop to consider and explore the conditions and looked for connections that make sense.
The three subjects are also taught according to specific principles. Students are exposed to domain knowledge (subject matter specific knowledge), while using heuristic strategies (generally applicable techniques), control strategies (general approaches for directing one’s solution process, and learning strategies (knowledge about how to learn new concepts, facts, and procedures).
To do this, teachers start by modeling the tasks, then coaching (or facilitating) while students do the task. The teacher scaffolds the students and then encourages them to verbalize their own knowledge and thinking. Then students are to compare their performance to others in a reflection and they are then to explore and solve their own problems.
While following the above order, teachers begin by teaching the big ideas and breaking them down later, after students understand the basic concepts. Then students are given increasing complexity while the teacher fades into the background and presents the student a variety of situations so they can learn to generalize the application of what they are learning.
Lastly, the processes are learned in the contextual environment or tasks, learn to communicate with others, set personal goals to learn and cooperate with other students to accomplish their goals.
AMY
This article is all about apprenticeship and the different aspects of it. It starts off talking about how, in ancient times, teaching and learning were accomplished this way. It was basically the vehicle to transmit the knowledge needed. Now it has been replaced by formal schooling. There is now a model that has been proposed that basically combines the elements of old apprenticeship and formal schooling; it is called cognitive apprenticeship. In this article, the features of traditional apprenticeship are presented and ways to adapt it to the teaching and learning of cognitive skills are discussed.
In apprenticeship, learners can actually see the process of the work they are learning but in schooling there is practice being performed involving problem solving, reading comprehension and writing. It is not always obvious, however. In apprenticeship, the process in always visible. Although schools have been relatively successful in organizing and conveying large bodies of conceptual and factual knowledge, standard pedagogical practices render key aspects of expertise invisible to students. To make real differences in students' skill, we need to both understand the nature of the expert practice and devise methods that are appropriate to learning that practice.
TRADITIONAL APPRENTICESHIP:
Here, the expert shows the person they are teaching how to do something while the student watches and practices portions of what they are being taught. Then the teacher turns over more and more responsibility until the student is proficient enough to accomplish the task they are given on their own. In other words, the teacher shows the student how to do a task and then helps them do it. There are 4 aspects of a traditional apprenticeship:
Modeling- the student observes the teacher doing different parts of the task
Scaffolding- this is the support the teacher gives the student in carrying out the task
Fading-this is the notion of slowly removing the support, giving the student more and more responsibility
Coaching- The teacher coaches the student through a wide range of activities.
Basically, it is the process of overseeing the student’s learning.
The interplay among observation, scaffolding and increasingly independent practice aids apprentices both in developing self-monitoring and correction skills and in integrating the skills and conceptual knowledge needed to advance toward expertise.
FROM TRADITIONAL TO COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP There are three important differences between the two: First, in traditional, the process of carrying out a task to learn is very observable but in cognitive, one needs to actually bring the thinking to the surface and make it visible; regardless of if it is in reading, writing, or problem solving. The teacher's thinking must be made visible to the students and vice versa. Second, in traditional, the tasks come up as they arise in the world as the student is completely situated in the workplace. In cognitive, the challenge is to situate the abstract tasks of the school curriculum in the contexts that make sense to the students. Third, in traditional, the skills to be learned inhere in the task itself. In cognitive, the challenge is to present a range of tasks, varying from systematic to diverse, and to try to encourage students to reflect on and articulate the elements that are common across tasks.
In order to move from traditional to cognitive, teachers must do three things: 1) Identify the process of the task and make it visible to students 2) Situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts so students understand the relevance of the work 3) Vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn.
COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP IN READING, WRITING and MATH
Reading- the basic model relies on modeling and coaching students in four skills: formulating questions about the reading, summarizing the reading, making predictions what will come next and finally, clarifying difficulties about the reading.
Writing- a good approach here provides explicit procedural supports, in the form of prompts that are aimed at helping students adopt more sophisticated writing strategies.
Math- This method is based on new analysis of the knowledge and process required for expertise, where “expertise” is understood as the ability to complete difficult problem-solving tasks. And like the other two subjects, this also incorporates the key elements of cognitive apprenticeship using modeling, coaching and fading and then at the end encouraging students to reflect on their own processes and practices.
A FRAMEWORK FOR DESIGNING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
There are four dimensions that constitute any learning environment: Content and four principles with in are: 1) Domain knowledge- includes the concepts, facts, and procedures identified with a particular subject matter. 2) Heuristic strategies-generally effective techniques and approaches for accomplishing tasks that might be regarded as “tricks of the trade” 3) Control strategies- basically, you control the process of carrying out a task. It is also known as “metacognitive” strategies. Control strategies have monitoring, diagnostic and remedial components. 4) Learning strategies- strategies for learning any of the other kinds of content described above.
Method Within the aspects of the method in which you teach include 6 aspects; Modeling- performing a task so the students can observe Coaching- observing students while they perform tasks and offer hints and feedback Scaffolding- the support the teacher provides to help students do the task Articulation- involves any method used to articulate their knowledge, reasoning and problem-solving Reflection- enabling students to compare their own problem solving practices to those of an expert, another student or an internal model of expertise Exploration- this involves pushing students into a mode of problem solving on their own.
It is important to give students tasks to structure their learning but also make sure they know what they are doing is meaningful. There are three principles that can help you to do that:
1) Global before local skills- basically, first have a clear conceptual model of the whole activity then a clear conceptual model of the target task acts as a guide for the learner’s performance. 2) Increasing complexity- refers to the construction of a sequence of tasks such that more and more of the skills and concepts necessary for expert performance are required. 3) Increasing diversity- refers to the construction of a sequence of tasks in which a wider and wider variety of strategies or skills are required.
The final dimension in the learning environment is
Sociology- there are 4 critical characteristics affecting the sociology of learning:
1) Situated learning- In order to foster learning it is important to have your students carry out tasks and solve problems in an environment that reflects the multiple uses in which their knowledge will be put to use in the future. 2) Community of practice- refers to the creation of a learning environment in which the participants actively communicate about and engage in the skills involved in expertise, where expertise is understood as the practice of solving problems and carrying out tasks in a domain. 3) Exploiting cooperation- this is when you have your students work together in a way that fosters cooperative problem solving 4) Intrinsic motivation- Related to the issue of situated learning and the creation of a community of practice is the need to promote intrinsic motivation for learning.
