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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.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 Tribe Apart by Patricia Hersch: A Review

First published 1998 by the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Restored 2026.

Ron Brandt's 1998 review of Patricia Hersch's A Tribe Apart records the book's central finding: in affluent Reston, Virginia, adolescents were growing up with almost no adults around, and had built a community of their own in the vacuum. The Initiative read it as evidence that schooling alone cannot repair a society's withdrawal from its young.

The book and the reviewer

Ron Brandt prepared this review for the Initiative shortly after the book's publication. A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, by Patricia Hersch, followed eight teenagers growing up in Reston, Virginia, a planned community of the well off and well educated. Brandt warned readers what to expect: most adults, especially those with little contact with adolescents, would be shocked by these portraits, because the young people in them are not delinquents but typical kids, and yet their risk taking goes far beyond the little mistakes earlier generations remember making.

Brandt credits the book's power to its author's method as much as its material. Hersch, a former contributing editor at Psychology Today, combined a reporter's appetite for concrete detail with a psychologist's insight into motivation, developing her subjects the way a novelist develops characters. Her plan was, in her own word, simple: a lone adult would enter the adolescent world, get to know it on its own terms, and tell representative stories of growing up from the points of view of eight young people, followed across several years in the early 1990s. Simple to state, Brandt notes, but hard to carry out, since it required winning the trust of teenagers naturally wary of a snooping adult, and keeping confidences even when what she learned might have alarmed their parents. The result he judged a remarkable accomplishment, both as fascinating reading and as documentation of an apparent social problem.

What Hersch found

The finding that gives the book its title is about absence. Hersch undertook the study because she was worried by the lack of adult presence in the lives of children and youth, and found the irony sharpest in Reston itself, a New Town founded as a place for families. In most homes both parents were at work, and adolescents were growing up with no adults around. Her conclusion, quoted in the review, has become one of the most cited sentences in the literature of American adolescence: "In the vacuum where traditional expectations for young people used to exist, in the silence of empty homes and neighborhoods, young people have built their own community."

Brandt presses the questions a careful reader should ask. Are these eight typical? If so, are their excesses really different from those of earlier eras? Is Reston unusual, or would similar studies find the same situation in other communities? Is the phenomenon peculiarly American or general to developed societies? Hersch's own answer is that the separation itself is new in kind: today's adolescents have an abundance of the space earlier generations coveted, and their dramatic separation from the adult world creates a milieu for growing up that adults categorically cannot understand, because their absence causes it.

How the Initiative read it

The review closes with a section, characteristic of the Initiative's book notes, relating the book to its own research synthesis. A Tribe Apart, Brandt wrote, provides frightening evidence that even in favored communities, where young people have lavish homes, good schools, and loving parents, values are skewed by an exploitive economy and a powerful peer culture. Brain research had shown that we learn what we pay attention to, and that attention is directed by emotion, so children's learning is shaped as much by the attitudes they bring to school as by the skill of their teachers.

The conclusion the Initiative drew was structural, and it is the reason this review stayed in the archive. The problem of adolescent alienation cannot be solved by changes made in schools alone, and even individual parents are often unable to equip their children to resist these influences. Education requires a shared relationship between schools and their surrounding communities that goes far beyond token parent involvement, because some of the most important things young people need to learn cannot be taught in classrooms. Adults will not see the qualities they seek in adolescents, responsibility, consideration, common sense, until new arrangements give every maturing child long term, personal learning relationships with adults, similar to the apprenticeships of former times.

Reading it now

Nearly three decades on, the book's descriptive claim has only gained force: the empty afternoon house has been joined by the glowing screen, and the tribe now assembles online, further from adult sight than Hersch could have imagined. The Initiative's reading holds up as well. Its argument that adolescence is an adaptive drive toward belonging and independence, which a community can either harness or abandon, is developed in the essay on adolescence as adaptation, and its proposed remedy, sustained learning relationships with adults, is the apprenticeship case made in the flagship reference on cognitive apprenticeship. The review itself remains what it was: a warning that the crisis attributed to schools is, in the words of the Initiative's founding statement, a crisis in society's commitment to young people.

A note on provenance

This restored edition condenses the Wayback Machine capture of 9 December 2015 of the original page at this address. Quotations are verbatim from that capture, which credits the review as prepared by Ron Brandt for the 21st Century Initiative and dates it 1998.