Cognitive Apprenticeship: Develop the Thinking for Outcomes Needed in Today’s Workplace

Today’s learning has been moving more and more toward informationpresentation and knowledge testing, despite the growing evidence that this willproduce no meaningful outcomes for the business. Instead, we need a new modelthat naturally incorporates the type of activities known to develop persistentabilities in learners. We need to move away from schooling and toward modelsthat are more aligned with how we naturally learn.

Before schooling, our most successful approach to learning wasapprenticeship, which intrinsically incorporated gradual acquisition ofmeaningful skills in a community of practice. However, that approach focused onskills that do not reflect the knowledge work that characterizes modern needs.Is there an approach that is similarly natural but focuses on the needs oftoday’s information era?

Back in the late 1980s, Allen Collins and John Seely Brown wroteabout what they called “cognitive apprenticeship.” Cognitive apprenticeship isa model of instruction that they had developed by abstracting three separateapproaches across different domains. Most models of instruction (and associatedtheories) are not static but develop over time. I contend that today’s modelsare heading toward where cognitive apprenticeship already is. Here I will layout the elements of cognitive apprenticeship and the valuable contributionsthose elements make, and talk about some extensions I add. I want to suggestthat cognitive apprenticeship is a fundamental model that incorporates the bestthings about creating learning experiences.

The subtext for this approach is “making thinking visible” (seeReferences: Collins, Brown, and Holum). Works by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter,by Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown, and by Alan Schoenfeld all provideddifferent approaches for making thinking manifest (see References). It’simportant to see how those three approaches established a basis for thisabstraction.

Scardamalia and Bereiter were focused on developing the ability towrite, a core cognitive skill. Their approach included specific processes thatwould provide valuable support for writing. To support this acquisition, theystarted by providing external guidelines and checklists. This approach of scaffolding(supporting) the writing process was coupled with gradually removing thesupport, requiring learners to bring onboard the necessary skills. Thus, theexternalization of the thinking via job aids was internalized through usage andincreasing requirements for learning the approaches.

Another approach came from work by Palincsar and Brown on reciprocalteaching, in this case for reading. In this process, the instructorwould model reading for the students, and then the students would take turnsreading. They would comment on one another’s performance, in constructive ways,as a way to practice the meta-skills of reading. As with the scaffoldedapproach above, the goal was to have learners internalize the performancemonitoring and develop the ability to apply it to themselves, becomingself-improving learners. Explicitly practicing the reading skills again madethem visible.

To round out the three, Schoenfeld’s area was mathematics. Herecognized that experts working on problems have so automated the proceduresthat they’d skip demonstrating the underlying thinking. So an expert would worka problem saying, “First you do this, then you do this…,” without recognizingthat really, the thinking is more like, “Well, you could do this or that, butbecause of this I’ll do this first, and then that leads me here, where I coulddo this or that, but because of this aspect I’ll do this next, and…” Schoenfeldmodeled the underlying thinking out loud; he even made mistakes and continued, thennoticed the mistakes and backtracked, showing not only the thinking but alsothe ongoing monitoring. Again, this is making thinking visible. 

See what we’re doing here: reading, writing, and ’rithmetic? Theseare core cognitive skills that exemplify the type of thinking increasinglyneeded in today’s workplace. The goal was to develop a model that worked acrosscomplex cognitive domains to support important learning outcomes. As it becomeseasier to automate rote efforts, the valuable work for organizations willincreasingly be the complex decisions embodied in cognitive skills like thesecore abilities.

Allan Collins and John Seely Brown noted that there weresimilarities among these approaches that formed a core model for developingcognitive skills: 

• Modeling the desired performance 
• Coaching performance 
• Providing and releasing scaffolding 
• Having students articulate theirunderstanding 
• Guiding reflection on their understanding
• Encouraging exploration of new problems 

An important distinction in Collins and Brown’s work is that theywrite about different types of knowledge. In addition to the domain knowledgeitself, the cognitive apprenticeship approach talks about heuristic knowledgeabout problem-solving in the domain, then about control strategies that guidesuccessful experimentation and monitoring progress, and finally learningstrategies. I find it useful to combine the domain and heuristic strategies asdomain knowledge, and control and learning strategies as meta-learningstrategies. Regardless, paying attention not just to the domain but also to thelearning-to-learn skills is a big part of creating a learner who can not onlyperform the task, but become a member of a community of practice, continue asthe task adapts over time, and improve on an ongoing basis, as well.

Presciently, Collins and Brown were talking about sequencing theskills with global-before-local practice, increasing the complexity over time,and increasing diversity. These are all elements that appear in newercompilations of learning research such as Make It Stick (Brown,Roediger, and McDaniel) and the Serious eLearning Manifesto (Allen,Dirksen, Quinn, and Thalheimer). The goal here is to gradually develop skillsin ways that are consonant with the way our brains learn.

These aspects were also inherently social, with students workingtogether in communities of practice around meaningful problems. Collins andBrown also consider several other aspects of the learning environment,including tapping into intrinsic motivation and working cooperatively.

While their efforts focused on children, the underlying approachis relevant for adult learning, too. The aspects of social, meaningful tasks,meta-learning, complexified practice, and more all align with the ways we learnbest. There are side benefits as well, developing the culture of learning aswell as the specific capabilities of a learning organization (see References: Garvin,Edmondson, and Gino).

Together, the elements of cognitive apprenticeship provide amethod for learning that can guide the design of learning experiences. I liketo assist the intrinsic motivation by emotionally engaging the learner at thebeginning, and closing the emotional experience at the end as well, but overallthis is a viable and valuable model that naturally incorporates the necessary elementsto make learning work. I encourage you to read the relatively short andincisive original article.

References

Allen, Michael, Julie Dirksen,Clark Quinn, and Will Thalheimer. Serious eLearning Manifesto. 2014.
https://elearningmanifesto.org

Brown, John Seely, Allan Collins,and Paul Duguid. “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning.” Educational Researcher, Vol. 18, No. 1. January-February1989.
https://www.johnseelybrown.com/Situated%20Cognition%20and%20the%20culture%20of%20learning.pdf

Brown, Peter C., Henry L. RoedigerIII, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Scienceof Successful Learning. Boston, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2014. 
https://makeitstick.net/

Collins, Allan, John Seely Brown,and Ann Holum. “Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible.” AmericanEducator, Vol. 15, No. 3. Winter 1991.
https://www.21learn.org/archive/cognitive-apprenticeship-making-thinking-visible/

Collins, Allan, John Seely Brown, and SusanE. Newman.“Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Craft of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics.”In Lauren B. Resnick (ed.), Knowing, Learning,and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, 1989.

Garvin, David A., Amy C. Edmondson,and Francesca Gino. “Is Yours a Learning Organization?” Harvard Business Review.March 2008.
https://hbr.org/2008/03/is-yours-a-learning-organization

Palincsar, Annemarie Sullivan, and AnnL. Brown. “Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering andComprehension-Monitoring Activities.” Cognition and Instruction, Vol. 1, No. 2. 1984.
https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PHS122/%CE%91%CF%81%CE%B8%CF%81%CE%B1/Reciprocal%20teaching.pdf

Scardamalia, Marlene, and Carl Bereiter. “Fosteringthe Development of Self-Regulation in Children’s Knowledge Processing.” InSusan F. Chipman, Judith W. Segal, and Robert Glaser (eds.), Thinkingand Learning Skills, Volume2: Research and Open Questions. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,1985.

Schoenfeld, Alan H. “Learning to Think Mathematically: Problem Solving, Metacognition,and Sense-Making in Mathematics.” In Douglas Grouws (ed.), Handbook forResearch on Mathematics Teaching and Learning. New York, NY: Macmillan,1992.
https://hplengr.engr.wisc.edu/Math_Schoenfeld.pdf