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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

Multiple Intelligences in the History Classroom

First published 1999 by the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Restored 2026.

In 1999 the history department at Camborne School in Cornwall reported an action research project applying Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences to GCSE history. Students identified their strongest intelligences and chose matching revision strategies, parents joined evening sessions on how learning works, and the department predicted a fifteen percent improvement in its top grades.

The project

John Welham of the Camborne School and Community College history department submitted this account to the Initiative in June 1999. Having become convinced of the importance of Gardner's concept of multiple intelligences, the department set out to use the idea in its teaching of GCSE history. The results Welham reported were a considerable growth in student awareness of how to learn, greater involvement of parents in the learning process, a complete reappraisal of the department's revision practice, and enough outside interest that the department found itself delivering training in other schools and contributing to local authority in-service work.

The premise, as the paper states it, is that each individual possesses a variety of intelligences to different degrees, and that this unique mixture shapes preferred ways of learning. Armed with a simple questionnaire to determine which intelligences were predominant in each student, the department reasoned, it ought to be possible to differentiate not by ability but by predominant intelligence. For their students they labelled the categories in plain terms: mathematical and logical, linguistic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, kinaesthetic, visual and spatial, musical, and naturalist, though the project focused on the original seven because Gardner's eighth was then unclear to them.

The method

At the start of the school year, Year 11 students came off timetable for a Learning about Learning week. Each received an hour's introduction to multiple intelligences and preferred learning styles, delivered as a model of the practice it preached, with plenty of activity and involvement. Students completed the questionnaire, identified their three strongest intelligences, and were then given concrete revision strategies matched to each preference, demonstrated in class and taken home on paper.

The flavor of the advice survives in the archived text. Interpersonal learners were told to make revision social, learning something and then explaining it to a friend, even building it into a sleepover. Intrapersonal learners were advised to hold conversations inside their heads and set themselves honest memory tests. Visual learners drew memory maps and put key images around the house; linguistic learners made mnemonics, rhymes, and flashcards, or recorded themselves reading the material; logical learners condensed whole topics onto a single sheet; physical learners recited while moving around like actors; musical learners set key ideas to the tune of a favorite song.

Notice what this advice actually amounts to: explaining material to someone else, self-testing, condensing, elaborating, and returning to material repeatedly. Whatever the labels, the strategies themselves are active and effortful, which matters for how the results should be read.

The parents

The project's most distinctive move was to give parents exactly what the students had received. Parents of Year 11 students came for an evening introduction to new ways of learning, completed the questionnaire themselves, and discovered their own preferences. The comments Welham records ring true across the decades: "All we were ever taught was what to learn, not how to learn it." The evening was repeated for parents lower down the school and drew a larger audience still.

One anecdote carries the whole argument. A mother arrived at parents' evening nearly in tears with gratitude. Her daughter, a thoroughly social learner, had been fighting her over revision, because the mother's picture of real studying was a child locked in silence with a book. Both had heard the same message from the school: some people learn better by working with other people, so make a virtue of it. Weekend sleepovers were allowed on condition of three hours of shared revision, reading, explaining, questioning, comparing, and discussing. The conflict dissolved. Another parent complained, jokingly, that his daughter had covered the bedroom, the stairs, and the inside of the fridge door with history revision posters: "Every time I go for the milk, Stalin is staring at me."

Results and resistance

The department followed the week with twenty weeks of voluntary after-school masterclasses, one session each week on learning itself and one applying the techniques to GCSE history revision. Attendance was excellent. Coursework scores improved and deadlines were met more promptly. On the basis of coursework and mock results, the department predicted an improvement of about fifteen percent in its share of top grades, which would lift it well beyond the national average for history, and more than twenty five students registered for A level history, double the previous year.

Welham is honest about the friction. Other staff resented the department's growing reputation, and he records a science teacher telling an enthusiastic student that such methods only work for subjects like history, not for real subjects like physics. His conclusion is measured in a way that repays attention: coming to an understanding of intelligence and the brain, he wrote, had not made the department work in different ways so much as underlined that what they already knew was good practice really does work. It gave a quasi-scientific underpinning for their hunches.

An honest reading

The theory has aged; the practice has not. In the years since this project, the research consensus has moved firmly against the idea that matching instruction to intelligence or style categories improves learning; controlled studies have repeatedly failed to find the predicted matching effect, and Gardner himself cautioned against using his theory that way. But almost everything this department actually did is what the learning sciences now recommend on other grounds: self-testing and explaining to others are retrieval practice, condensing and elaborating build understanding, teaching students how learning works is metacognition, and enlisting parents changed the conditions of study at home. The labels were the scaffolding; the active learning was the building. Read alongside the archive's reviews of Schools for Thought and The Unschooled Mind, this paper is a fair record of how Gardner's ideas reached ordinary classrooms, and of the good they did there for reasons the theory only partly explains.

A note on provenance

This restored edition condenses the Wayback Machine capture of 3 October 2015 of the original two-page article at this address. Quotations are verbatim from that capture.