Come! Sit at the adult table, join our club, read this book, offer your thoughts, step in from the cold: whether longed for or out-of-the-blue, those moments change you, sometimes forever. School might do more of that.

Apprenticeships and internships can feel like that, like an invitation into a unique and special world: a community of practice. That feeling of welcome and arrival, of stepping through a portal, leaving something behind, and arriving somewhere amazing…it is very engaging.

Consider:
Where in your school do students experience “stepping into a community of practice”?
Is where they arrive amazing?

Immersion is part of it, breathing a different air, but doing with instead of doing for, that is the enduring benefit. Apprenticeships invite you into a community of learning and doing. There is no passivity in an apprenticeship. Here, we do the actual work of and in the world together. Learning “about” things is secondary, doing them with more experienced peers is primary.

I worked for my dad in high school, programming computers. Summers I drove with him to a windowless warehouse in Nashua, New Hampshire, and worked there alone until my dad was ready to go home, often after midnight. I sought his assistance if I had difficulties, but this was relatively rare. The result was that I spent those summers very isolated.

I gained some self-esteem and appreciated the money and the drive home listening to radio stations from far away somehow bouncing down to us from the ether. I learned from seeing my dad work, what relentless pursuit of a goal looked like. I learned to be tenacious. I came to dread the strange emptiness of that life, however, and how lonely it felt. Missed here was an opportunity to truly work with. A job may feel like an invitation, but it is not necessarily an apprenticeship.

The medieval model of placing kids into some life-long pursuit would not work of course. The world is changing too fast and that particular job will have changed or even disappeared by the time they leave school. The point is not to slowly build a master, but to share knowledge and ways of being and a sense of community within a particular context.

What did I learn from my dad?  Something about character. Responsibility, endurance, service, precision, quality, imagination, honesty, failure, and creativity all took on more poignancy when the game was real, consequences were more than a grade, and the expectations were not teacher imposed. 

I also learned something about context: what it meant to work in an office, even if it felt more like a warehouse.  I began to envision how it actually felt to do this work, and began to wonder if it actually suited me.  I wished later that I had paid more attention to that.

The experience offered lessons in transference: the skills and habits of mind taught in school were no longer ends in themselves, but tethered to outcomes in service to actual goals. Building flowcharts wasn’t about learning to think logically, it was thinking logically in order to build a computer program to manage the huge volume of sales data arriving nightly from retail outlets all over the United States.

Finally, I got to hang out with my rather imposing dad, and if I didn’t exactly identify with him, I at least discovered something about what kind of person I wanted to be. It is one thing to be exposed to tenacity, I figured out, but to develop it yourself requires a powerful sense of purpose. In a pamphlet for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Carol Dweck and her collaborators put it like this:

How can school offer invitations and fulfill the promise of true apprenticeship? There is still a lot of lecturing at and doing homework for in the schools I visit, and not very much exploring with. Even when I see conversations, they tend to be led by a teacher who seems to have the answer already. Creating an environment that still teaches useful content but engages students like an apprenticeship is clearly challenging.

Barbara Rogoff’s work with indigenous Mayan villages in Guatemala is instructive. Rogoff coined “Learning by Observing and Pitching In” to describe students that contribute to the activities of the community, gradually learning skills through their “participation in” rather than “learning about”. Rogoff imagined school as a community of practice in her book Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community (2001). Her approach repositions teachers as fellow students, the teacher simply more skilled in the practice and eager to share their expertise. Schooling itself can become an apprenticeship as long as a community views the job of learning as a collective endeavor.

Rogoff emphasized the collaborative nature of the enterprise, the desire students have to belong to the community and therefore to contribute, the feedback that students receive from the community, and the role of non-verbal communication and shared references in supporting the student. A physics teacher I had in high school modelled this perfectly when he challenged us to create a hologram using lasers. Dr. T had never done it before, but thought it would be cool and that it would teach us a lot. This project based learning had us in it together, and it was cool. Unlike any lecture or lab in physics to that point, we felt invited into Dr. T’s world, into a community of practice, with students and teacher alike as fellow learners contributing to a common enterprise. Creating that hologram revealed the teacher to be a fellow student.

It may be worth considering:

Does the distinction between teaching to and learning with resonate with you?
How might you change your practices to invite more collaboration with your students?

Instead of making students of teachers, we can also make teachers of students of course. One study shows that students who simply expected to be teaching the material they studied retained material better than those expecting simply to be tested:

It may be worth considering:

Instead of assignments intended to demonstrate that your student know something you want to teach, could you instead invite your students to teach you and the rest of the class something new?

 When Robert Halpern, Paul Heckman and Reed Larson (2013) set out to address the lack of academic engagement in adolescent youth, they identified in their prescription many of the key elements offered by apprenticeships. In their words, good learning is:

In-Depth and Immersive…
Good learning ensures youth gain the capacity to sustain interest in question-driven inquiry.  In depth learning gives youth the opportunity to gain mastery in the discipline – and they want to be good at things.

Rooted in a Community of Practice…
Good learning takes place when less experienced learners can work alongside more experienced peers as well as skilled adult mentors.  Joint effort and distributed responsibility speeds up learning.

Attends to Motivation…
Good learning recognizes young people are intrinsically motivated to learn at deeper levels – not by external rewards but by personally meaningful experiences – when it is worth learning, and when it connects to other people, to their peers and to adults.

Chance to Apply Knowledge and Make Meaning of Learning Experience…
Good learning creates a sense of purpose ...and taps into young people’s desire to use, apply, make sense, and make connections.  It allows them to work on tasks with meaning and value to self and others.

Diverse as a Whole…
Good learning allows young people to learn about (and more selectively to experience) a range of adult roles, the kinds of tasks adults devote themselves to.

Supported by a Rich/Multi-Dimensional Adult Role…
Good learning recognizes strong relationships are knowledge pathways – mentors must work alongside youth, and exemplify how professionals see and experience the world. Mentors encourage youth to learn, and help young people trust themselves as learners.

Outward Bound and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University developed another approach to apprenticeships in 1991, with “Expeditionary Learning”. As practiced at the King Middle School in Portland, Maine, for example, teachers are encouraged to choose the professional role(s) that students will assume during an “expedition” :

Students paired with working professionals are encouraged to take on those roles in order to fully occupy the mindset and get feedback on their work. They get a sense of what that professional’s work is really like: emotionally, intellectually, and physically. They are encouraged as well to reflect on how the role applies to their own talents and aspirations.

It may be worth considering:

Your classroom, your school, they work as an apprenticeship whether you intend them to or not. By your actions, your attitude, your energy and your relationship with them, what is it that you show your students about the world and their place in it, independent of the actual subject matter you teach?

James Levin at the University of Illinois puts forth another vision of apprenticeships in an article proposing “tele-apprenticeships” in which novices join a community of practice slowly, through “lurking” and eventual participation.

Levin also points to on-line work as a way to connect kids with practice communities. He posits that novices and a beginner’s mindset offer a valuable fresh perspective. This idea offers the network as context in lieu of a specific workplace, but offers as well an international reach and access to more problems and projects. The network is the context of most work anyway.

Reflection didn’t come naturally to me growing up, and I doubt that I am so unique.  I needed help investigating feelings and intuitions and ideas about the future. I needed pointed questions: What did I think of the work? What did I think of the people? What did I think of the context? What did I hate? Can I imagine doing that or being that? The right questions would have made the experience truly meaningful instead of merely useful. The right questions would have helped me figure out what kind of person I wanted to be. The right questions would have helped me to address what Erik Erikson termed the defining crisis of adolescence: what the hell am I going to do with my life?

References

Dweck, C. S., Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Academic Tenacity, Mindsets and Skills that Promote Long-Term Learning. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Edutopia (2009, June 18). Expeditionary Learning at King Middle School. http://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/stw/edutopia-stw-maine-project-learning-six-step-rubric-planning-successful-projects.pdf

Halpern, R., Heckman, P. R. & Larson, R. W. (2013). Realizing the Potential of Learning in Middle Adolescence. The Sally and Dick Roberts Coyote Foundation.

Levin, J. (2002). A 2020 Vision: Education in the next two decades, Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 3(1).  http://faculty.education.illinois.edu/j-levin/2020-vision.html

Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages, Memory & Cognition (42: 1038). doi:10.3758/s13421-014-0416-z

Perkins, D. (2009). Making Learning Whole. Jossey-Bass.

Rogoff, B., Goodman-Turkanis, C. & Bartlett, L. (Eds.) (2001). Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community. Oxford.

Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!