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 Fading: support is progressively withdrawn until the learner works alone.

Hayek and the Second Hand Dealers of Ideas

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

John Blundell's 1998 essay explains Friedrich Hayek's claim that intellectuals, the second hand dealers in ideas, decide which ideas reach the public. Socialism spread because thinkers embraced it long before voters did, and any body of ideas, including the science of learning, travels the same road from scholars through communicators to policy.

Why a learning archive carried an economics essay

This essay by John Blundell first appeared as an introduction to Friedrich Hayek's The Intellectuals and Socialism, published by the London based Institute of Economic Affairs, and the Initiative reprinted it on its website with the permission of the author and the IEA. The Initiative's editors were explicit about their reason. The economic ideas in the piece would excite controversy, they wrote, and "we neither endorse nor reject them. We are interested in what the author has to say about the interaction of ideas, intellectuals and society." An organization trying to move research on human learning from laboratories into classrooms and parliaments recognized, in Hayek's theory of how ideas travel, a map of its own problem.

The story of a meeting

Blundell opens with an anecdote. In April 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, carried, uniquely in the magazine's history, at the front of the issue. Among its readers was Antony Fisher, a former Battle of Britain pilot in his early thirties, who went to see Hayek at the London School of Economics to ask what could be done about the advance of collectivism in Britain. Hayek's answer set the course of Fisher's life. He warned him against wasting time on a political career, because the decisive influence in the battle of ideas was wielded by intellectuals, whom he characterized as the second hand dealers in ideas. If better ideas were not getting a fair hearing, the remedy was to found a scholarly research organization to supply intellectuals in universities, schools, journalism, and broadcasting with authoritative studies.

Fisher made his fortune introducing factory farming of chickens to Britain, and used it to follow the advice, founding the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1955. Soon after their meeting, Hayek expanded his theory in the essay The Intellectuals and Socialism, first published in 1949, which Blundell's piece introduces.

The theory

Hayek's intellectual is neither an original thinker nor an expert, and need not even be intelligent. What defines the type is the ability to speak and write on a wide range of subjects, and a way of becoming familiar with new ideas earlier than the audience does. Journalists, teachers, broadcasters, ministers of religion, commentators: these are the gatekeepers through whom scholarship reaches the public, and their selection of which ideas to transmit, made according to their own dispositions, shapes what a society comes to believe.

Blundell summarizes the insights he finds in Hayek's essay. Ideas that fail to remain relevant and inspiring open the door to their rivals. A people's sense of its own history plays a larger role in its politics than is usually admitted. Practical men and women, absorbed in the minutiae of today, lose sight of long term considerations, so the outcome of today's politics is already set, and the leverage lies with those who work on the ideas of tomorrow. Hayek's primary example is the century from 1850 to 1950, in which socialism was nowhere, at first, a working class movement; in every country that turned to it, there was a long earlier phase in which socialist ideas governed the thinking of the active intellectuals. Once that phase is reached, it is a matter of time before the views of today's intellectuals become tomorrow's politics.

Blundell supports the argument with a witness from the other camp, quoting the famous close of Keynes's General Theory: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." And he notes the irony that Hayek lived to see his own ideas re-enter the mainstream, often unattributed, described as Thatcherism or neoconservatism; the governor of a central bank could give the annual Hayek lecture on reforms with what he admitted was a distinctly Hayekian flavor while conceding he had scarcely read a word of Hayek.

There is a self-deprecating turn near the end that explains the essay's charm. Most readers, Blundell observes, are themselves Hayek's second hand dealers in ideas. Conceit makes us all prone to believe we are original thinkers, but we are mostly transmitters of ideas borrowed from earlier minds, secondhand in a non-pejorative sense; the scholars who really are the founts of new ideas are far rarer than we suppose.

What it meant for education reform

The Initiative's decision to host this essay is best read as self-description. Its founders had spent years synthesizing research on how humans learn, and had discovered that the research does not travel on its own. Between the cognitive scientist and the classroom stand the second hand dealers: teacher trainers, education journalists, officials, textbook writers, and the authors of briefing papers. Whether a finding about apprenticeship, adolescence, or understanding ever reaches practice depends on whether that layer picks it up, which is why the Initiative built websites, briefings, and reading lists rather than a political campaign. Hayek's advice to Fisher, to work on the intellectuals rather than stand for office, is recognizably the strategy pursued in everything indexed in the research archive, and stated in the Initiative's own founding statement. His closing counsel not to trim, because a diluted ideal is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire enthusiasm, reads like a motto for an organization that kept arguing for the transformation of schooling rather than its adjustment.

A note on provenance

This is a restored edition, condensed from the Wayback Machine capture of 5 April 2016 of the two page article at this address. Quotations are verbatim from that capture. The essay itself is John Blundell's, first published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1998 and reprinted by the Initiative with permission; this page preserves the Initiative's edition and its editorial framing, with the summary standing in for the full text.