Cognitive Apprenticeship

Abstract : Even today, many complex and important skills, such as those required for language use and social interaction, are learned informally through apprenticeshiplike methods -- i.e., methods involving not didactic teaching, but observation, coaching, and successive approximation while carrying out a variety of tasks and activities. The differences between formal schooling and apprenticeship methods are many, but for our purposes, one is most important. Perhaps as a by-product of the specialization of learning in schools, skills and knowledge taught in schools have become abstracted from their uses in the world. In apprenticeship learning, on the other hand, target skills are not only continually in use by skilled practitioners, but are instrumental to the accomplishment of meaningful tasks. Said differently, apprenticeship embeds the learning of skills and knowledge in the social and functional context of their use. This difference is not academic, but has serious implications for the nature of the knowledge that students acquire. This paper attempts to elucidate some of those implications through a proposal for the retooling of apprenticeship methods for the teaching and learning of cognitive skills. Specifically, we propose the development of a new cognitive apprenticeship to teach students the thinking and problem-solving skills involved in school subjects such as reading, writing and mathematics.