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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

Roland Meighan on Natural Learning

First published 1999 by the 21st Century Learning Initiative. Restored 2026.

Roland Meighan argued in 1999 that Britain was entering the new century with the same basic learning system it had entered the old one, and set out nine principles of educational reconstruction: uniform approaches harm many learners, schooling and education are not the same thing, and flexible systems produce flexible people.

The author and the occasion

Roland Meighan was a writer, publisher, broadcaster, and researcher on learning systems, Director of Educational Heretics Press and of the Education Now Publishing Co-operative, and a trustee of the Centre for Personalised Education. His essay, titled Some Principles of Educational Reconstruction, was one of the earliest articles the Initiative carried on its first website, and it kept its place in the archive for years because it stated, more bluntly than most, the case for natural learning and home based education that ran alongside the Initiative's own research synthesis.

Meighan opened with a provocation. Something was about to happen in the United Kingdom that had seemed impossible twenty five years earlier: the country was about to enter the next century with the same basic learning system with which it had entered the twentieth. He recalled that a former Chief Inspector of Schools, Edmond Holmes, had written off the system of imposed uniformity as long ago as 1911, and he quoted Bertrand Russell's verdict of 1935: "We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought." If the system had returned to that model, Meighan argued, the urgent task was to establish principles for its reconstruction.

The nine principles

The essay proceeds through nine principles, and the restored edition follows their order.

The first holds that uniform approaches to all learners are intellectual death to some. Researchers could already identify over thirty differences in individual learning styles, cognitive, affective, and physiological, so any single approach to curriculum or teaching must fail a large share of its audience. Meighan drew on Charles Handy's account of multiple forms of intelligence to note that schools took only the analytical kind seriously, though every kind would be needed in the working world ahead.

The second principle is a sentence Meighan borrowed from George Bernard Shaw: what we want to see is the learner in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the learner. Official thinking treated education as something done to learners. Yet the most successful learning anyone accomplishes, learning to walk, to talk, and to make sense of the world, happens the other way around, with parents coaching rather than instructing. "How stupid of us," Meighan wrote, "to forget it, ignore it or lose confidence in it."

The third principle concerns discipline. Modern life requires competence in three forms of it: authoritarian, autonomous, and democratic. Schools in the UK worked almost exclusively to the authoritarian model, which Meighan granted a modest place, but only a modest one. The absence of democratic experience he judged a serious weakness: young people needed the actual experience of sharing power and responsibility, not a token school council confined to non-controversial topics, which breeds cynicism. Tacking a subject called citizenship onto an imposed curriculum, he wrote, will not do it.

The fourth principle starts from the observation that information was doubling roughly every ten years. Subjects, the staple diet of schools, were a declining part of the tool kit; what mattered was the know-how of the researcher, learning how to find out, to learn, relearn and unlearn, and to manage one's own learning on the cycle of plan, do, and review.

The fifth is what Meighan called an iron law: rigid systems produce rigid people, and flexible systems produce flexible people. Quoting Clive Harber, he insisted the first questions are always what we are educating for, what sort of people we expect to produce, and what kind of society we envisage. A complex, changing society needs flexible people, and what he called the day-prison model of schooling was not noted for producing them.

The sixth principle observes that an information-rich society allows a variety of learning locations. Knowledge was no longer confined to the one place called school; homes, workplaces, museums, and libraries could all serve, along with broadcast media and home computers, and the Open University had already made the idea commonplace at university level.

The seventh, drawing on Ference Marton's research at Gothenburg, distinguishes deep learning from shallow learning. Shallow learners accumulate facts without a conceptual map of how they relate. Schools, Meighan argued, were better at shallow learning than deep learning because of the inflexibility of their curriculum, methods, and assessment.

The eighth redefines the teacher. Following John Holt's proposal that what we learn best from good teachers is how to teach ourselves better, Meighan asked for the teacher as learning coach and learning travel agent, supporting learner-managed learning. His test of an educated person in a changing society was simple: they can fill the gaps. Those who have only learned how to be taught must wait for someone to direct their next learning; those who have learned how to learn can go on filling the gaps at will.

The ninth principle states that schooling and education are not the same thing. Meighan assembled his witnesses: Churchill's advice to his education minister that "Schools have not necessarily much to do with education," Mark Twain's "I never allowed schooling to interfere with my education," Everett Reimer's observation that true educational experiences occur in schools despite school and not because of it, and John Gatto's warning: "When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling." Schools claim to work with children, Meighan wrote, but in truth they end up working on children, training most of them, whatever the intentions of their teachers, to be habitually subservient.

Reading it now

Meighan wrote as an advocate, and the restored edition should be read as advocacy grounded in the home education movement he championed. What the intervening decades have added is a larger evidence base on home based education, which has grown from a fringe practice into a substantial sector in Britain and North America, with outcomes that vary as widely as the families involved. His specific claims about learning styles have fared less well: matching instruction to style categories has not survived experimental testing. But his broader architecture, the distinction between schooling and education, the teacher as coach, deep learning over coverage, and the learner in pursuit of knowledge, anticipated much of what the learning sciences later confirmed, and connects directly to the apprenticeship tradition preserved in this archive's flagship reference on cognitive apprenticeship.

A note on provenance

This is a restored edition, condensed and lightly edited from the Wayback Machine capture of 26 December 2005 of the original static page at this address, part of the Initiative's earliest web archive. Quotations are verbatim from that capture. The full essay ran considerably longer; readers wanting the complete text can consult the archived captures directly, and the surrounding collection is indexed in the research archive.