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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

Where Did Grammar Schools Come From?

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

Grammar schools did not begin with the 1944 Education Act. The Initiative's history traces them from a sixth century monastic foundation in York, through the Tudor endowments and the Elizabethan doctrine of teacher censored knowledge, to their near extinction in the 1700s, their reinvention in 1902, and the flawed tripartite settlement of 1944.

The question that prompted the post

The post opens with a small confession. John Abbott had been asked, the day before, by a man much involved in educational policy making, to explain the origins of grammar schools. The questioner assumed they were the good parts of the 1944 Education Act. Abbott's answer, that the oldest known grammar school in England is St Peter's School in York, dating from the sixth century and probably founded with the abbey itself, surprised the policy maker rather more than the question had surprised Abbott. The anecdote sets the theme: a policy debate conducted in ignorance of a fourteen hundred year history.

Monastic Latin and the long medieval settlement

Over the following seven centuries, the post explains, monasteries established many more grammar schools. Their specific purpose was to educate future priests in Latin, the language of every church service and of diplomacy across a Europe of many tongues. The method was memorization: older monks drilled Latin into their young charges through endless hours of repetition. For centuries, right up to the Reformation, a grammar school education meant just that, repetition, memorization, and the development of oratorical skill. It was not about establishing new knowledge or thinking for oneself. It was an initiation into the language and mindset of an aristocratic order that saw the feudal landowner and the bishop as society's natural apex, and the niceties of Latin grammar as the essential skill of the aspiring young man.

Dissolution, Edward VI, and the Tudor endowments

The Reformation, coinciding with the Renaissance, broke the assumption that nothing changes. Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and used the sale of their lands, thought to be about a quarter of all the land in England, to pay debts and fund his navy and foreign wars. The monastic grammar schools largely collapsed with them. It was the boy king Edward VI, succeeding in 1547, who redirected some monastic money into new semi secular foundations, the Edward VI grammar schools; Shakespeare attended one such school at Stratford a few years later, probably itself the recreation of an older monastic school. Tudor merchants, no longer able to endow monasteries where monks would pray for their souls, followed the royal example, endowing new grammar schools through the later sixteenth century to give free education to deserving boys.

Ascham and the doctrine of censored knowledge

With the monks abolished, someone had to decide who would teach and what. The post gives that role to Roger Ascham, the outstanding classicist and former tutor to Queen Elizabeth, whose book The Scholemaster of 1570 was the first in English on how to teach. Two of Ascham's principles the Initiative could applaud: that hard wits matter more than quick wits, thinking well more than thinking superficially, and that pupils should be helped to learn rather than terrified by failure. The third was the fateful one. Ascham held that learning from a book or a teacher was many times more effective than learning from experience, and his reason was, in the post's word, curious: nine days in Italy had shown him more liberty to sin in one city than nine years in London, and he concluded that the schoolmaster's job was therefore to censor what students study. Knowledge, preprocessed by teachers, became the guiding principle of the Elizabethan grammar school, and the classroom was set apart from experience.

Decline, and reinvention from above

The post then follows the long ebb. Milton proposed academies giving parity of esteem to artisan and academic studies; the restored Stuart court had no patience with the idea, preferring a classical curriculum that kept aristocracy and gentry separate from the mass of the people. Through the eighteenth century the growing business and industrial community exposed the irrelevance of much classical schooling, and even the Earl of Chesterfield could advise his son in 1746 that knowledge of the world is acquired in the world, not in a closet. By the late 1700s many old grammar schools simply disappeared as parents sought hands on experience for their sons instead, a midshipman's berth being the gentry's favourite; Winchester College received only nine pupils in the century's final years. Decline was locked in by law when the citizens of Leeds, wanting their 1550 foundation to teach mathematics and modern languages, were overruled by a ruling that lasted until 1844 and confined grammar schools to Latin and Greek.

Then came reinvention from above. In 1829 Thomas Arnold turned the old grammar school at Rugby into what quickly became known as a public school, fusing a reinvented classical curriculum with a specific Christian purpose and a boarding experience for the wealthier officer class; as more old grammar schools followed, the number available to ordinary people fell sharply. By 1902, with the elite well served and the emerging middle classes starved of schooling fit for future administrators, government created the first state provided grammar schools, not as the Elizabethans had done, but, in the post's phrase, as watered down versions of the recently created public schools, inheriting the assumption that Latin and Greek mattered more than science or technology.

1944 and the verdict

Only in 1944 did England erect the tripartite system: grammar schools for the most able, technical schools for the middle, modern schools for the majority, allocation decided by an intelligence test at eleven. Retrospective research, the post notes, shows that fourteen per cent of pupils, one in seven, were misplaced, and the deeper fault was the assumption of a single, generalizable intelligence quotient that could predict future performance. Within twenty years the public and the politicians had rejected the tripartite concept, its faults all too clear. The post ends with the arithmetic that still governs the selective debate: anyone looking back nostalgically to the grammar school must accept that reintroducing it would mean telling three quarters of the population, at the age of eleven, that they were not good enough. The fuller account of the tripartite years is in the restored pages on the tripartite system, and the deep history of the Latin classroom begins in Thesis 21 on Roman law and order.

Provenance

This restored edition was prepared in 2026 from the Wayback Machine capture of 26 February 2016 of the original 21learn.org blog post, dated 2009 and filed under academies and grammar school. The restoration follows the post's narrative closely in summary and short quotation, with obvious typographical slips in the capture silently corrected. The original page carried a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs notice. More of the Initiative's writing is in the research archive, and the author's restored profile is here.