Cognitive Apprenticeship

Generally speaking after reading the weekly articles I have a difficult time applying the information to my classroom. It's hard for me to make the connections learned from studies performed on university students to my 11 year olds. Thank goodness for the Darling article! The article provided a plethora of ideas for me to use in the classroom in addition to giving me a much better understanding of the cognitive apprenticeship method. After reading the first few articles I felt like there was no way I could implement this method in my classroom. I couldn't afford to develop expensive computer simulation software nor could I take my students on field trips everyday that would provide authentic learning experiences.

After reading the Darling article I began to think about how to implement this in my classroom and realized that I already am! My 7^th grade marketing students are creating a project where they had to develop a product, come up with a target market, create promotional materials for their product, create a marketing plan, and present their product to the board of directors (our administrative team & parent volunteers). I've been working side by side with my students to "coach" through the project. I've provided examples of real promotional materials and corporate marketing plans. I have developed an outline to help them pre-write their marketing plan and provide advice and feedback throughout the process.

So now I feel confident that I can apply this method to my teaching, I am beginning to think about how to make the transition to online content. If I made this an online assignment, I would provide links to several examples of student work, and articles I found that could help my students learn about each aspect of the product. I would help them set up elluminate sessions to discuss details of their products with their group members, I would teach them to use skype to present their product. After the use of skype, I could record their presentation and add my voice comments and post the video for all class members to see and learn from. I also just took a look at furl.net (diigo.com) and would definitely incorporate this tool to help my students research the elements of a marketing plan using articles that I've preselected. This would help scaffold them about the type of article I expect.