Skip redundant pieces
Center for Teaching Excellence

ADVANCING MY TEACHING

Cognitive Apprenticeship

Using your discipline as a framework for learning engages students and enables them to develop practical and cognitive skills integral to your field. To provide a disciplinary context for learning, first identify concepts, perspectives and problem-solving skills necessary for success in the field. Because these may be skills and thought processes that you’ve long since internalized, you may find it useful to observe the approach beginning students take toward material and compare it to your own expert approach to identify the skills new students lack. Next, develop lessons and assignments that engage students in the practice of the discipline. Finally, plan assessments to measure students’ thinking processes and approaches to problem-solving within the field, as opposed to focusing on course content alone.


Additional considerations when planning your course:

  • Model the ways scholars work by posing questions at the beginning of lecture, allowing students to pose possible answers, then using lecture material to discriminate among correct and incorrect answers.
  • Challenge students to apply the ways of thinking you are teaching to other aspects of their lives; this will close the gap between students’ lived experience and academic disciplines.
  • Pay attention to learning as a developmental process as you plan lessons. What differences exist between the kinds of thinking we might expect of students who are just beginning study in your discipline versus those who are ready to graduate?
  • Design your course to help students think in their disciplines, but also challenge them to question those ways of thinking.



"One of the stated goals of my Research Methods in Psychology course is to help students think like scientists. A danger of this goal is the unstated implication that they start the class thinking like non-scientists, or believe that scientific thinking is in some way superior. This is a bad tone with which to start the course. To overcome this problem, I try to identify ways in which students intuitively “think like scientists” already. I also try to show how scientists are human and how we also sometimes ignore our own rational approach. This helps demystify science for the students and makes them ready to consider scientific thinking as an everyday tool with which to approach information."
—Paul Atchley

l 1l 2 l 3 l