What is cognitive apprenticeship?

Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of instruction in which teachers make thinking visible: they model expert reasoning aloud, coach students as they attempt the work, scaffold the parts students cannot yet manage, and fade support as competence grows. Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum introduced the model to a wide audience in 1991.

Who developed the cognitive apprenticeship model?

Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Susan Newman first described the model in a 1989 research chapter. The 1991 American Educator essay by Collins, Brown and Ann Holum, restored on this page, is the version most educators cite and assign.

What are the four dimensions of a cognitive apprenticeship learning environment?

Content (domain knowledge, heuristic strategies, control strategies, learning strategies), method (modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, exploration), sequencing (increasing complexity, increasing diversity, global before local skills), and sociology (situated learning, community of practice, intrinsic motivation, cooperation).

How is cognitive apprenticeship different from traditional apprenticeship?

Traditional apprenticeship teaches physical work that is naturally visible, in the place where the work is used. Cognitive apprenticeship adapts the same arc to thinking, which is invisible: reasoning must be deliberately externalized, school tasks must be situated in meaningful contexts, and practice must be varied so skills transfer beyond a single setting.

What do modeling, coaching, scaffolding and fading mean?

Modeling: the expert performs the task and voices the reasoning while the learner observes. Coaching: the learner performs while the expert watches and guides. Scaffolding: the expert supports only the parts of the task still beyond the learner. Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

The Initiative's Original Mission Statement

First published 2000 by the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Restored 2026.

The Initiative's founding statement declared its essential purpose: to facilitate new approaches to learning drawing on insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity. Its sharpest claim was that what politicians call a crisis in schools is better understood as a crisis in society's commitment to young people.

What this page is

This is the Initiative's own historical statement of purpose, preserved as a primary source. It described the organization as it saw itself around the turn of the millennium, and it is kept distinct from the current About page, which describes this publication as it exists now. The text below restores the substance of the original statement, lightly edited for the restored edition.

The statement

The 21st Century Learning Initiative described its essential purpose as facilitating the emergence of new approaches to learning, approaches that drew on a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity. It believed this would release human potential in ways that nurture local democratic communities worldwide, and would help reclaim and sustain a world supportive of human endeavor.

The Initiative was established in 1995 by a group of English and American businessmen and organizations. Their motivating problem was fragmentation: research on learning and learning processes was scattered across many disciplines and embedded in many different universities, research institutions, and businesses around the world, and someone needed to make sense of it as a whole. By the time this statement was published, that work of synthesis had reached the stage of offering training programs to organizations and groups in the United Kingdom and Canada.

The statement's central conviction was that the more that is discovered about how the brain works, and about the various motives that drive human behavior, the clearer it becomes that education has to be about much more than intellectual development, and that learning and schooling are certainly not necessarily synonymous. What politicians and commentators in many lands described as "a crisis in schools" was, the Initiative argued, better understood as a crisis in society's commitment to young people, aggravated by a materialistic agenda that degraded the spiritual needs of individuals and nations to a single-minded drive toward economic profitability.

Where it came from

The Initiative grew out of the work of the Education 2000 trust, established in the UK in 1983. For four years the Initiative was based in Washington DC, and its work centered on a series of conferences held at Wingspread in Wisconsin, involving some sixty researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from fourteen countries. Out of those conferences came the synthesis that the organization spent the following decades elaborating.

The statement also recorded a fact worth preserving for its own sake: the Initiative established one of the first major websites on learning to be set up on the internet. That early web presence let it grow rapidly as a virtual organization, and its pages were frequently cited as source material on university degree courses, in doctoral theses, in policy papers issued by government agencies, and in speeches by educational and community leaders. The archive you are reading is the descendant of that site.

The message

The Initiative encapsulated its message in the titles of three presentations that were widely adopted by other organizations: "Battery Hens, or Free Range Chickens: What Kind of Education for What Kind of World?", "Reversing an Upside Down and Inside Out System of Education", and "Over schooled and Undereducated," on getting the balance right. The last of these grew into the book Overschooled but Undereducated, and the questions all three posed run through the whole collection indexed in the research archive.

The statement closed by describing the website itself as the reference source for all this activity, designed to be useful both to readers unfamiliar with the ideas and to those anxious to cut straight to the primary research on which the synthesis was based. It also recorded plans, characteristic of the organization's ambitions at the time, to establish a body for the study of human learning, values, ethics, and community development.

Reading it now

Read a quarter century later, the founding statement holds up as a diagnosis. Its two central moves, from "crisis in schools" to "crisis in society's commitment to young people," and from schooling to learning as the fundamental category, are the same moves this publication still makes when it examines classrooms shaped by machine assistance. The founder's story is told on the John Abbott page, and the organization's fullest single argument survives in the restored briefing on the solution to England's education problem.

A note on provenance

This restored edition is based on the Wayback Machine capture of 22 February 2015 of the original page at this address, where the statement carried a publication date of 2000. The text above preserves the statement's structure and wording with light editing for the restored edition; quoted phrases are verbatim from that capture.