Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Crafts of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics

This chapter attempts to elucidate some of those implications through a proposal for adapting apprenticeship methods for the teaching and learning of cognitive skills. The development of a new cognitive apprenticeship to teach students the thinking and problem–solving skills involved in school subjects such as reading, writing, and mathematics. To make real differences in students' skill, need both to understand the nature of expert practice and to devise methods appropriate to learning that practice. An idea of the methods and why they are likely to be effective, the chapter considers some of the crucial features of traditional apprenticeship, as practiced in a West African tailoring shop. Cognitive apprenticeship teaching methods are designs to bring these tacit processes into the open, where students can observe, enact, and practice them with help from the teacher and from other students. In addition to the emphasis on cognitive and metacognitive skills, there are two major differences between cognitive apprenticeship and traditional apprenticeship.