John Tomsett

So much this from @HaleDonal in @johntomsett’s Collins et al’s Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action. Only showing a worked example is not making expert thinking visible or accessible to apprentices. “Put simply, students are unlikely to make use of potential models of good writing acquired through reading because they have no understanding of how authors produced such text.” And one way to make this expert thinking visible? A lovely scripted commentary unpacking the question. ⬇️

Day 3 of teaching with a script for the first time. Today, I used a script to model how to rank the 10 oil-rich countries in Southwest Asia we have been studying based on the degree to which they have reinvested or concentrated the windfall from their oil wealth. The script guided my think-aloud, making explicit the questions I ask, the evidence I weigh, and the reasoning I use to arrive at a ranking. Two observations from today: 1. Scripts can help make expert thinking more explicit and repeatable. Today’s think-aloud connects directly to some reflecting I’ve been doing on making expert thinking visible, informed by Collins et al.’s research on cognitive apprenticeship and @johntomsett book Collins et al’s Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action. One of the challenges of teaching disciplinary thinking is that experts often perform complex mental processes without realizing how much they’re doing or how invisible those processes are to novices. When I rank countries, I’m drawing on knowledge, asking questions, weighing evidence, and making judgments that can easily remain hidden if I only model the finished product. The script helped me deliberately model those questions and decisions rather than simply explain the steps. It gave me a structure for making the thinking visible so students can begin to recognize and eventually use those same processes themselves. 2. Scripted thinking can risk making complex reasoning feel too linear. Ranking countries involves judgment, weighing competing evidence, and recognizing that a country’s position can change depending on the lens being applied. A script provides a clear pathway through that thinking, but I need to be careful that the modeling doesn’t make the process appear more straightforward or definitive than it actually is. My goal is to scaffold students’ thinking, not imply that there is always one obvious answer or a single correct path to a conclusion. Expert thinking needs to be made visible, but students also need to see how experts navigate uncertainty, competing evidence, and difficult decisions. Three days into the experiment, I’m thinking more about the relationship between scripting and cognitive apprenticeship. A script may help me make expert thinking visible and deliberate, but the test is whether that scripted modeling helps students develop the knowledge and thinking processes to do more of the work independently.

“It’s really important that you don’t just present pre-prepared examples. Dare to fail, so that students can see that it is hard work, that it takes time to hone the skills.” “Remembering to give this kind of detailed metacognitive commentary about how you got to the correct working, before starting to present it, can really help students learn what they should be thinking (and doing)…” These are such important points about making expert thinking visible from Liz Dunbar and Tom Norris in Collins et al.’s Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action. I know I’ve certainly fallen prey to the worked-example trap of showing students what the finished expert product looks like and assuming they can make the massive leap from point A to point B. But making expert thinking visible isn’t just about showing students what an expert work looks like. It’s about showing them how the expert got there: the decisions, the reasoning, the knowledge, the seductive details, and all the messiness along the way. We need to model the process, not just present the product. If we wanted to teach someone to paint like Michelangelo, we wouldn’t show them one of his finished paintings and tell them to get to work. We’d make the process visible, demonstrating the techniques, explaining the decisions, and showing them how to work through the challenges that arise. And that means being willing to make mistakes in front of our students. Not because we need to manufacture failure, but because expert work is rarely as effortless as it appears in its finished form. Our students need to see what expertise looks like in action, not just what it looks like when the work is done. @johntomsett

“We take no shortcuts. We work as hard as the students need to in order to make our expert thinking visible.” I really love this mindset from @HughJRichards in Collins et al.’s Cognitive Apprenticeship in Action. There’s the curse of knowledge, but there’s also the curse of expertise: we become so familiar with thinking within our domain that we lose sight of the knowledge, connections, and reasoning processes we draw upon to do the work. As experts, the work may feel relatively easy to us, and we can make critical assumptions about what students should know and be able to do without our guidance. We take for granted how much thinking we do automatically, how many steps we skip, and how many connections we make without even realizing it. My job is to make that thinking visible. To slow down, model the process, explain the decisions, and show students how to work through each step. I need to make explicit what expertise allows me to do implicitly. @johntomsett