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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.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 Social Implications of Globalization

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

Paul Cappon's address asks whether new ways of learning can humanize globalization. His answer: globalization is a malleable reality, and the same decades that produced it produced a revolution in the understanding of human learning. If citizens can learn differently they can think differently, and reshape global institutions with human hands.

The occasion

This essay was written for the State of the World Forum 2000, and the Initiative's later archive filed it under 2004 with Paul Cappon as author. It opens with an epigraph from the Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal on the fear that keeps people small, and its first move states the theme: the social implications of globalization had so far been treated as an afterthought, an unfortunate consequence of progress, when in fact globalization is a malleable reality whose promise must be continuously rethought and reinvented. The task, in the essay's governing image, is to shape globalization with human hands rather than allow impersonal forces to determine our lives.

The promise

Cappon locates the promise of globalization in three related possibilities. The decline of the nation state could allow fuller development and expression of individuals and communities, with regions affirming themselves as centralized power loosens. The rise of civil society, stepping into the vacuum left by state dominance, could deepen the sense of community. And because community can be local, regional, and worldwide at once, global institutions could flourish, strongly linked to an international civil society.

His prophet for this hopeful reading is Marshall McLuhan, who wrote in 1964 that electric speed had contracted the globe to a village and heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. The heightened awareness McLuhan described had, by the millennium, grown exponentially through the internet, so that political debate could be held simultaneously in all corners of the globe. Even the disenfranchised who protested at global forums were, in McLuhan's terms, no longer contained but involved: friends and critics alike could participate in globalization's continuous reinvention.

The reality

Against the promise, Cappon sets the reality: concentration of capital and wealth, an unprecedented rate of technological change, the paradox of information concentrated in few hands alongside an almost infinite capacity to disseminate it, and the decline of the nation state. He quotes a bleak contemporary assessment from Le Monde Diplomatique of private conglomerates acting as the Earth's de facto leaders, unchecked by legislatures, parties, or media too parochial or too complicit to correct them.

Yet the essay refuses the counsel of despair. The same decline of the nation state had strengthened local communities and regions in Europe, and in much of the developing world village councils and local organizations were assisting human development in ways national and international structures could not. The principal challenge of globalization, he concludes, is how to shape it to a human purpose: to link civil society directly and forcefully to global processes, to remodel existing institutions, and to devise new ones that better represent the realities we are willing to create.

Learning as the countervailing force

The essay's distinctive move, and the reason it belongs in this archive, is where it looks for the lever. If globalization's driving forces progress exponentially, Cappon argues, perhaps the ongoing discoveries about how humans learn provide the countervailing means to shape the changes: if we can learn differently, perhaps we can think differently. He cites the work of the 21st Century Learning Initiative directly, crediting its synthesis of research on the development of the mind and its demonstration that the mind is essentially malleable in its early phases, anatomically and functionally. These discoveries, he writes, amount to a revolution in the understanding of human learning paralleled only by the revolution in communications technology, and he borrows Stephanie Pace Marshall's declaration that the fundamental purpose of education is not to credential vocational knowledge in schools, but to build the capacity of each learner to advance the human condition.

From this follows a critique of how learning had been enlisted by globalization so far: as a competitive advantage, with literacy rates and degrees per capita traded like corporate taxation policy in pursuit of financial benefits for the fortunate few. Education, like information, should be shared, not made the basis of undue competition; the learning infrastructure of nations deserves the attention their physical infrastructure receives. And transforming how citizens learn strengthens civil society itself, so that people could enhance and expand international institutions rather than express their concerns from behind barricades.

The commitment

The conclusion is generational self-criticism and a pledge. The baby boom generation, Cappon writes, had been too rigid in its thinking, reluctant to adapt international organizations born in the same historical period as itself, some of its members even nostalgic for the static geopolitics of the Cold War. Adapting to globalization requires abandoning old anchors and developing flexibility of mind and spirit, and new knowledge about how much more individuals can learn is the key to that flexibility. The essay ends by proposing a global covenant in education and learning: to work together so that learning is de-commodified and becomes a shared resource for individual and community empowerment. Achieve that even partially, he argues, and the equations driving globalization's negative forces change; we would be shaping globalization with human hands, and those hands would come from every corner of the global village.

Reading it now

A quarter century on, the essay's optimism about connective technology reads poignantly, and its warnings read well: information did concentrate, institutions did lag, and the disenfranchised found their involvement could be organized against global cooperation as easily as for it. But its central wager, that the science of learning is a public good whose sharing changes what societies can do, is the wager this publication still makes. The Initiative's own statement of that position stands in the founding statement, and the research it synthesized is indexed across the restored archive.

A note on provenance

This restored edition condenses the Wayback Machine capture of 9 December 2015 of the three page essay at this address. Quotations and close paraphrases are drawn from that capture; the text addresses the State of the World Forum 2000, while the archived page carried a date of 2004.