Collins et al's Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action

- Blurb -

In 1991 Allan Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum published ' Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible' . Nearly a quarter of a century later John Tomsett encountered their paper and since then, it has influenced his teaching immeasurably. Collins et al. believed that ' domain (subject) knowledge . . . provides insufficient clues for many students about how to actually go about solving problems and carrying out tasks in a domain' . They believed that you had to make expert subject thinking visible to students. Consequently, Tomsett developed a number of techniques which made his expert subject thinking visible to his students, to great effect. Beyond his own practice, the principles behind Collins et al' s paper have been woven throughout Huntington School in York, where Tomsett is headteacher, a research school whose teachers are committed to developing evidence-informed classroom practice. In this book, a number of Huntington School teachers discuss, in a series of brief essays, what they consider to be the expert thought processes specific to their individual subject domains. They explain in detail how they use cognitive apprenticeship techniques ' in action' to make their disciplinary thinking visible and help their students learn those same expert thought processes. This book is a priceless contribution to the current debate about the curriculum and how it is taught in our schools.