Sherry’s Congitive Apprenticeship notes I’ve been working with the principles of cognitive apprenticeship for the past few years. From articles and books I’ve read and my experience in the classroom, I’m persuaded that this approach helps my students learn. I would define learning as developing the ability to use information, concepts, and methods in ways that are similar to, if not identical with, the way experts in the field use them. As an expert user of knowledge in my field (as discussed in the How People Learn chapter you read for last week), I not only know more than my students do, I know differently. One of my colleagues here at YSU, who teaches foreign languages, has a good analogy for this. We are the “native speakers” of our disciplines, while our students are acquiring the discipline like a second language. We have to explain the “grammar” (the rules or basic concepts of the field), help them develop a vocabulary (the information and terms commonly used in the field), let them hear what the language sounds like (or see how experts work with the ideas, methods, and materials of the field), give them manageable opportunities to practice “speaking” (doing what practitioners in the field do), and offer helpful suggestions based on their individual responses, to help them fine-tune their abilities. What does this look like in practice? For me, cognitive apprenticeship means planning courses to ensure that I do three key things: Modeling Scaffolding Coaching Susannah has kindly created a webpage with links to some further introductory notes and some sample materials to help you see how I use these ideas. My hope is that my notes and examples will help you think about how to incorporate cognitive apprenticeship into your own course. In the poster tool, you’ll also see two new boxes for Week Four. One asks you to think about how you could incorporate modeling into your course. What strategies do you, or could you, use to show students the thinking processes involved in activities like the one they’re doing? The other question asks about scaffolding. Consider what kind of support and guidance could help students complete learning activities more easily. You might also think about how your instructions to students could change over time as they develop understanding and become more independent. So let me know how I can help. I’m looking forward to “talking” with you about your work. Let me explain briefly what I mean. Modeling refers to a process of showing students my thinking process, making my cognitive practices visible. This sounds fairly simple, but I find this the most challenging part of the process. In part, the difficulty is that the process of cultural analysis is quite complex, and I’m hardly even conscious of the decisions I make as I do it. That facility is part of what makes me an expert, after all. So in order to model, I have to try to break the process down, reflect on it, and explain it. Modeling might take the form of a web exhibit that walks students through my research process (see my poster on “Making Interdisciplinarity Visible”), or it might mean a classroom demonstration, a sort of “think-aloud,” in which I try to let my students hear what’s in my head as I read a poem (this is harder than it sounds). The other problem with modeling is that it can give students the false impression that there’s only one right way to do something, so I try to model multiple strategies, not just one. I want them to be able to imitate what I do, but I don’t want them to just mimic me, nor to use only one approach. I’d always thought that classroom discussion accomplished this, but more and more, I think that’s not true. In class, we discuss all the time, but I was rarely very systematic about how I structured the discussion. I would, for example, invite students to suggest questions for discussion, but I didn’t give them examples of different kinds of questions and how they work. I would bring in contextual resources, but I wouldn’t explain to students why I chose those resources or how I found them, nor would I discuss overtly why I thought they mattered. The more I understand about modeling, the more effort I put into trying to explain the reasoning behind the things we do in class. So, for example, in my Introduction to Literature class this week, we’re examining different kinds of questions. I asked them to come up with questions about the play we’re currently studying, and then I created a chart that breaks their questions into categories, explains the categories, comments on how the questions work, and in a few cases, suggests ways of making the questions more useful. That’s a much more careful approach to discussing questions than I used to employ, but I think it will help students understand what it means to ask good questions about literary texts. Scaffolding refers to the way I structure in-class and independent activities in which my students practice the strategies I want them to learn. I try to start with small tasks, breaking the larger process of cultural analysis down into tasks like responding, questioning, and contextualizing, and in many cases I offer guidance on various ways of doing each of these things. For example, this week I’m trying to teach upper-division literature and American studies students some strategies for contextualizing texts. Along with general discussion of what contextualizing means, I’m asking them to practice. Today, I’m giving them a handout that lists four kinds of context and sends them to particular pages in the book we’re using to find information – so I’m giving them the question and pointing them to the information. Next time, I’ll ask them to develop questions, and I’ll suggest some web and print resources where they might find information, but they’ll have to go find the data. Finally, they’ll explore the context of a text they’re studying individually. So as we move through our study of this practice, they first complete activities that are very carefully structured and over time they get less and less help from me. As they develop expertise, they can work more independently. Coaching is central in cognitive apprenticeship. This is the part where the “apprentice” aspect of this becomes clearest, because just like apprentice shoemakers or cabinet makers, my students will practice doing things and receive a lot of feedback. In my upper-division class, I’ll read over their responses to today’s questions and offer comments back about how well they did, ways of thinking about it that they may not have considered, and so on. As much as possible, I offer comments every time they try something. Sometimes my comments are individual written notes, but sometimes coaching is part of class discussion. And my comments focus not so much on evaluating what they did but on suggesting ways to adjust their practice to make it work better. A lot of teachers do this in grading all the time, so this isn’t necessarily a revolutionary practice. The difference is that in cognitive apprenticeship, coaching occurs not only on final versions but on the low-risk practice rounds. I think coaching works best if students have subsequent opportunities to try the task again, either by redoing the same assignment or by using the same strategy on a different assignment. To get a better idea of how this plays out in my courses, you might want to look over the Cognitive Apprenticeship Table, which lays out the sequence of assignments in an upper-division American Studies course. You might also want to read a bit of the conversation I had in with Amy Holzgang in last year’s online institute, about strategies for making thinking visible.