I found this week’s reading about cognitive apprenticeship and the situated nature of learning really interesting. When I do these readings I always try to think about the ways that I believe I learn best and see if they are in line with the focal learning/teaching theory of the reading. Throughout this reading, there were many times I read something and was just agreeing in my head like, “mmhmm, mmhmm. I experienced that.” For example, I always hated studying vocabulary in high school. We would open the vocab books each Monday and copy the 10-20 vocab words into our journal and then go to the sentences page and fill in the blanks with the vocab words. Come Friday, I would memorize the words out of the book quickly and forget the words as soon as I turned the test in. I think I learned very few words through this method but I know learn knew words frequently through interactions, especially professional interactions. Even last week in this class, we used words like cognitive conflict, equilibration, conceptual ecology, and incommensurability. I just listed those four words off the top of my head and am confident that I could use them correctly because they were all words that we defined in our group and then used in our models of conceptual change. Using the words in this specific context helped me learn them. This week at the middle school Scott used the word incommensurable and I thought to myself, “oooo, I know what that means!” I guarantee if my high school English teacher used one of our vocab words the next week I would not know what she was talking about and there’s a good chance I would not have even noticed she used the word. Basically, that was a really long way of saying that I agree that what is learned should not be separate from how it is learned (i.e. it is important to learn things in close to the same context to which you would use the learned thing).
Another part of the reading the really stood out to me was the phrase, “it is quite possible to acquire a tool but be unable to use it.” This made me think of classes where you “plug and chug.” I picture classes where I was given formulas and was able to solve a problem using the formula but I never really understood why I was doing what I was doing. Therefore, if I would have run into the same problem in an “authentic” situation as the reading calls it, I would not be able to solve the problem because I likely forgot the formula or wouldn’t even recognize to apply it. This helps me understand why AST and the teachers at the middle school really push students to come up with their own terms and solutions and really understand those before introducing the technical terms and formulas. This practice was summarized in the reading as, “instruction gradually introduces students to the standard algorithm, now that such an algorithm has a meaning and a purpose in their community.”
This leaves me racking my brain for ways that I can bring “authentic” situations into my future classroom.
Grace,
As someone with adhd I totally agree with your stance on memorization learning. The last thing that I ever wanted to do was sit there and memorize words instead performing tasks where knowing the words and definitions was only a single part of the challenge. I know it sounds cliche but the more I am challenged the more I like what I am doing. Now even though in my highschool experience the vocab lessons had this already figured out I do remember many other topics in school where memorization was the sole lesson plan.
Grace, I totally agree with your very long way of saying “I agree” haha. I can very easily remember the vocab days in my high school advanced literature class. I don’t think I could list a handful of words I learned from that class because it all seemed like nonsense. Our teacher didn’t even seem to care, but still did it because he “had to”. The article also had me reminiscing on my “plug and chug” days in physics. I will admit that Brown et al. would probably applaud the “authentic” experiences physics lab had us work through, but even then, those experiences were muddied because we learned most of the content during a lecture that left me insufficiently prepared. Funnily enough, when I was imagining what a perfect cognitive apprenticeship could look like in the classroom, I imagined AST and how teachers “work” through the problem with the students. AST obviously has less structuring though, as the practitioner (teacher) doesn’t give the apprentice all of the answers. I believe I’m seeing even more merit in AST!!