Click on the link below if you wish to read or print the whole article. Even if you are not a Maths teacher, the content is most useful.

Cognitive Apprenticeship:   Making thinking visible.

• Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of instruction that makes thinking visible.
• Merely observing a master teacher at work is inadequate unless the student teacher also gains access to the reasoning that underlies expert teachers’ actions.
• You, as mentor teacher, need to consider, reflect on and question why you use certain methods and strategies.
• You need to be able to explain the thinking that underlies your practices so that your student teacher understands the purpose behind your approach.

An important distinction between novices and experts “is that experts employ ´heuristic´* methods, usually acquired tacitly through long experience, to facilitate problem solving”.  The ‘magic’ of cognitive apprenticeship is that the student teacher is exposed to all these ‘rule-of-thumb’ approaches that have been developed through experience by the mentor teacher.

* Heuristic: enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves