Throughout the user experience, the explicit process that learners embark upon has been set out deliberately to enhance the learning of the user. In particular, this process has been well defined throughout the user experience.

As a user begins the journey, a classroom environment presents itself, complete with a vexing problem for the student. As our perplexed student begins to wonder how to tackle the difficult task, he begins to daydream. As the dream develops, his wise friend appears, setting out the challenges before him. As he wanders through this dream, he encounters three knowledge bearing individuals, each presenting a different learning strategy from the visual, auditory and kinesthetic perspectives. As these strategies become apparent to the student, he encounters numerous challenges drawn from each content area. With the assistance of his wise friend and the knowledge of different learning styles, he is able to meet the challenges. After our student returns from his dream, his classmate asks for assistance on the problems in the class. Full of new knowledge about learning strategies, our student can help him.

Throughout the journey, the student is scaffolded in his learning experience through his encounters with the knowledge bearing individuals and his wise friend. His friend and the visual, kinesthetic, and auditory individuals model and coach our student through the process of acquiring knowledge of the different strategies. As the student encounters the learning challenges, he must apply the knowledge of strategies that he has gained previously. After completing each task, the student continues through the journey, tackling each subject area. In the end of the journey, the student is reminded again by his wise friend of his newly acquired strategies. When the student awakens from his daydream, he has the opportunity to apply his new knowledge when his friend asks him about the assignment in the class.

The following theories are used as a basis for our pedagogical model.

 

Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible

Alan Collins, John Seely and Ann Holum propose that students learn best when the thinking is made visible -- this is called cognitive apprenticeship.  In the cognitive apprenticeship model, parallels are made with the traditional teaching tradition of apprenticeship and schooling.  Traditional apprenticeship focuses on the combination of observation, scaffolding and

 

1. Give students a conceptual model - a picture of the whole -- is an important part of the apprenticeship's success in teaching complex skills without resorting to lengthy practice of isolated subskills.

  • Provides learner with an advanced organizer for their initial attempts to execute a complex skill, thus allowing them to concentrate more on execution than would otherwise be possible.
  • Provides an interpretive structure for making sense of the feedback, hints and corrections from the master  during interactive coaching sessions
  • Provides an internalized guide for the period when the apprentice is engaged in relatively independent practice.

2. Apprenticeship derives many cognitively important characteristics from being embedded in the subculture members are participants of the target skills.

In order to translate the model from traditional apprenticeship to cognitive teachers need to:

  • identify the process of the task and make them visible to the students
  • situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts, sot that students understand the relevance of work
  • vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn

Teaching Methods

“Teaching methods should be designed to give students the opportunity to observe, engage in, and invent or discover expert strategies in context.” (Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, pg. 43)

First Phase:  Modeling, Coaching and Scaffolding

"To make real differences in student's skill, we need to understand the nature of expert practice and devise methods that are appropriate to learning that practice."(Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, pg. 8)

Second Phase: Articulation and Reflection

"The next two (articulation and reflection) are methods designed to help students both to focus their observations of expert problem-solving and to gain conscious access to (and control of) their own problem-solving strategies." (Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, pg. 43)

Third Phase: Exploration

"The final method (exploration) is aimed at encouraging learner autonomy, not only in carrying out expert problem-solving processes but also in defining or formulating the problems to be solved." (Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible, pg. 43)