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was able to teach history in such a way that I felt as if I was his individual pupil and he was teaching me the ways of historical content and using its lessons as a way to live a life as a better citizen in our society.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.
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