Situated Learning Environments and Cognitive Apprenticeships

When I was first reading through these articles for this week on cognitive apprenticeships, I began thinking back about when I wanted to become a teacher. I first knew that I wanted to be a teacher while I was a junior in high school sitting in my AP United States History class. After that class was over I fell in love with history and focused my sights on becoming a social studies teacher. I was really good at Science and English, along with Physical Education (more along the lines of Athletic Training) and could have easily enjoyed teaching any of those subjects. Now I bring up this memory because I feel that I fell in love with history at that point in my life because of my teacher/mentor, Mr. Francis Bryant. He was able to teach history in such a way that I felt as if I was his individual pupil and he was teaching me the ways of historical content and using its lessons as a way to live a life as a better citizen in our society. Again, Mr. Bryant was able to achieve that master-apprentice relationship with a majority of his students and it fostered a classroom environment that was unique in where we as a class were able to learn from him as an expert but also learn from each other as we discussed readings and primary sources. I understand now the use of scaffolding much more after these readings, where I as the expert am required to build lessons around the fact that I teach/outline a concept then allow my students to complete an activity to show their understanding of what I was outlining. This model allows for students to escape the abstract and use real-life application to understand the content, which is a relief in social studies classrooms.

I believe that I use a small model of this cognitive apprenticeship model in my classroom today. Specifically, in my Honors Law and Justice class (primarily juniors and seniors) we overview the legal system of the United States through all facets of the law, i.e. criminal, civil, family, housing, constitutional. Every other week, I take the students to the library and outline a specific research assignment that is related to the type of law that we are currently studying in class. They are to complete the research assignment using the internet and any given literature within a set time period (usually 5 calendar days) and to fully complete each assignment they are to use/explain the various guidelines of the law that is being studied in class. I first outline the law in class leading up to each assignment and then scaffold the assignments to match up to the type of law where students have to use real life scenarios/cases to complete each research request.

In terms of creating this model into a Web-based module, I do not believe that this model is entirely too difficult to transition. As I explained in my example from my classroom, I have already made the majority of my assignment Web-based. I post the assignment on our digital classroom website (Blackboard), where they can download it and use any of the supplemental resources I place in each assignment to spring board their research. To make this entirely Web-based, I could place videos of my lecture(s) online and have them a sequential order to allow for the students to follow and understand the basics of the law and then assign the research assignments. Now this could be where students can skip the videos and move into the assignment right away, therefore undermining the teaching opportunities. Also, another barrier is the instant feedback that would be compromised because the teacher would not be there directly watching the student complete their research (as I am when I take my students to the library to start each research assignment). Other multi-media tools that could be to help transition this model online would Skype, Elluminate, or any other tool that would allow for simultaneous meetings and sharing of documents and ideas.

Problem-Based Learning

Looking at the Problem-Based Learning and how it works, I can agree that this method can easily make the transition from the regular classroom to the internet classroom. I think that a lot of the meetings between the students and the problems they are going to have to solve could easily be adapted to use online mediums, such as Elluminate and Skype. From initially reading about PBL, I agree with pre-testing students' knowledge to see where they stand with the material.  This would allow for me to be able to differentiate with more in depth instruction.  The PBL model seems to require even more planning on the teacher's side along with more student collaboration.  Because of the emphasis on interdisciplinary instruction, the planning could be distributed among teachers resulting in more intricate problems that are required for this model to work.  One major barrier that I recognize as most important is Hung's point about breadth versus depth of the curriculum.  This is one barrier that I don't believe you can overcome while using PBL correctly.

I would not use PBL in my classroom as a 9-12 social studies teacher because I can not sacrifice breadth of the curriculum for extreme depth.  This is because of what is required of me to teach due to the NCSCOS for world history, civics, and US history.  The curriculum standards do not let me go into depth on issues as the PBL requires.  However, PBL may be more suited to social studies electives because of fewer time and curriculum restraints. For instance, in my Law and Justice electives, I would be able to alter my research assignments to be more collaborative and specific problem based.  Unless I see myself teaching at the university level, I feel that this is a method that is much more suited for math or science classes.  Collegiate level courses would be perfect for PBL because of the flexibility and depth of these courses.

There are plenty of different web-based tools to incorporate PBL in distance education, specifically online meeting places such as Elluminate, Skype, Google Docs, and/or Wiki space pages.  By using Google Docs and Wiki space places, content can be modified by various people easily and conveniently.

Guided Design

Listening to the Camtasia presentation by Dr. Oliver and reading Wilson and Cascada,I realized this is by far my favorite model of instruction that we have studied thus far this semester. I am a huge believer in group work, especially when the students are given a problem and they are to somehow decide on a solution and then discern how to actually achieve that solution. I believe that students are able to learn more from each other through problem-solving rather than constant direct teacher instruction. The students are much more likely to learn the material from real world applications with themselves than in a classroom. There many parallels between this model and the audio-tutorial, specifically the barriers of the two models. The two big barriers I see with the guided design model are time and preparation. As with the audio-tutorial model, the time and preparation is needed to create the audio tapes and here with the guided design, the barriers are the time and preparation to get the material ready to utilize in a class setting. Now, if there is a strict organizer and authentic facilitation by the teacher then these barriers are easier to overcome for which the results speak for themselves, with the studies from WVU in the mid-1970's and the 90% passing rating in the Wilson reading.


I would gladly use this model in the future and I think it would work wonders at the high school level. On a psychological note, students in high school are trying to learn how to build relationships while working with other people under specific conditions, and this model is a perfect medium for that type of learning environment to exist. Again I tell my students all the time that they learn more about social cues and how to work with others more than the content I am trying to teach them. Therefore, I have always been a major proponent of student-centered learning where I am more of a facilitator; and this model it couldn't be better for that role. I would not have to change much of this theory's practices or guidelines to have it adapted into the traditional classroom, which is good from the planning perspective of the traditional classroom. However, placing this on the Web would be a different issue.


Again another reference into my discussion of the audio-tutorial approach is that I can see much of this guided design model being put into practice in the framework of this class, with the group projects where students are given a choice of a couple templates and then choose one and come up with theirown solution(s). The reason why I am referencing back to old posts is that, as I have said before, that to make this model work in the online environment, there are aspects that need to modified to fit the specific environment that you are trying to create. There are many  web-based tools that could be used to help create a more guided purpose for their small groups to use, such as Skype (which could provide immediate feedback), Google docs, Elluminate, Blackboard, etc.




References


Wilson, P. N. (2004). Mutual gains from team learning: A guided design classroom exercise. Cardon Research Papers in Agricultural and Resource Economics (No. 2004-07). Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona.