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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

A Solution to England's Education Problem

First published 2009 by the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Restored 2026.

John Abbott's 2009 briefing argued that England's education problem is simple beneath its politics. Two Victorian myths still shape the system, so money and prestige flow to secondary schooling while early childhood is undervalued, and adolescence, a biological drive toward independence, is treated as a problem to be managed rather than the opportunity it is.

A parliamentary briefing in ten points

This essay, dated 23 September 2009 and revised 13 February 2013, belongs to the Initiative's late period of direct policy argument, written by its president John Abbott as a briefing in ten numbered points followed by four recommendations. The restored edition follows its structure in prose.

The argument opens with the two myths. The first is the Victorian conviction, encouraged by Queen Victoria's oft stated opinion that little children should be seen and not heard, that early childhood is a stage to be minded rather than nurtured, which survives in the modern assumption that the youngest children can be handed to day care so that parents can work. The second is the invention of the expensive Victorian public school, which persuaded the country that once childhood playfulness was over, a boy should be intensively taught by academics rather than learn on the job, as the generations that produced the Industrial Revolution had learned. The consequence, Abbott argued, persists: primary education receives significantly less money and status than secondary, so classes are largest when children are youngest, precisely backwards.

The middle points bring the sciences to bear. Findings from neurobiology and cognitive science were showing the vital importance of early childhood nurture, refuting the assumption that intelligence is mainly good genes and demonstrating how stimulating environments build the young brain. Human babies are born with brains less than half structurally complete, so the species depends on inquisitive infants interacting with caring environments; with such nurture humans became the planet's preeminent learning species. Abbott liked to note that the research gave substance to the wisdom of the ancients, quoting Confucius, "Tell me and I forget; show me and I remember, let me do and I understand," and St Augustine, "I learnt most not from those who taught me, but those who talked with me."

The briefing's most distinctive claim concerns adolescence. In the first decade of life children are clone-like learners, copying prodigiously and well, which is why primary pupils are generally content with school. From eleven or twelve, however, a biological process begins dismantling a share of those earlier networks each year, forcing the young to work things out for themselves. Teenage angst, on this reading, is essentially a biological process with a purpose: it is essential to shake youngsters out of clone-like learning, or they will only be fit for the world of their parents. Adolescence is a biological opportunity, not a problem, and becomes a problem only when the young are denied the space to work things out for themselves. Secondary schools, judged as managerial successes, find themselves compelled to deny exactly that freedom. The essay compresses the diagnosis into a single sentence: overschooled children lead to an undereducated society.

Two further points complete the case. The Victorians, in their hurry to capitalize on the factory, destroyed apprenticeship without ever asking what was lost: a way of learning on the job in which the master demonstrates, breaks the task into components, drills the novice in each, and then lets the novice bring it all together, with the overarching aim that the apprentice should surpass the master. Cognitive research has since shown these principles to be deeply engrained in how humans learn, the argument set out at length in the archive's flagship reference on cognitive apprenticeship. Abbott seals the point with Nietzsche: "It's a bad teacher whose pupils remain dependent upon him." And finally, democracy itself is at stake, for as the ancient Greeks recognized, it cannot work unless the populace is educated to use its vote intelligently. He reaches back to Milton's definition of a complete and generous education as that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices public and private, of peace and war.

What should be done

The recommendations follow from the diagnosis. First, England must develop a vision of the society it wants, one that genuinely commands mass support, taking courage from the fact that Milton wrote his in the midst of a civil war. Second, it must stop building new schools and inventing new systems of governance that deny local people their democratic responsibility for the education of their successors. Third, it must reverse its priorities: the earliest years of education should be where the classes are smallest and the best teachers work, while secondary education becomes the process of weaning young people off their dependence on the classroom by progressively inducting them into the life of the greater community. Fourth, Parliament should use a period of economic constraint to reappraise the basic purposes of education and build learning strategies that go with the grain of the brain, recognizing the parallel responsibility of parents and community. The essay's moral crux is a sentence the Initiative used often in its final years: knowing what we now know, we no longer have the moral responsibility to carry on with what we used to do.

None of it will happen, Abbott concluded, until the English regain a sense of their mutual interdependence, and until teachers are equipped to demonstrate that they know as much about how children learn as about the subjects they teach.

Reading it now

The briefing distills the argument of Abbott's book Overschooled but Undereducated, and its two scientific pillars have held up unevenly: the case for early nurture and for adolescence as an adaptive stage has strengthened, while the specific figures about fracturing neural networks were always a popularization and should be read as such. The claim that has aged best is structural: a system that spends least on the youngest, and denies the oldest their independence, is fighting human development at both ends. The Initiative's fuller account of the science is examined in the essay on adolescence as adaptation, and the founding argument behind it stands in the original mission statement.

A note on provenance

This restored edition condenses the Wayback Machine capture of 1 October 2015 of the original page at this address, which carried the full text with its dates of writing and revision. Quotations are verbatim from that capture.