Of all the articles I read last year during my first year of Moving the Needle, the Collins, Brown and Seely article impacted my teaching the most. It had never occurred to me that I was omitting several subtle but important steps in the IRW process, yet still expecting my students to somehow master the process. It was a classic eureka moment for me, though it is probably more accurate to describe it as a how-did-I-not-see-that, facepalm kind of moment.
Since then, I have been striving to mmodel the IRW process by making my thinking as visible as possible. I made some progress this semester when I outlined an essay during a think-aloud lesson. Someone fell asleep in the back of the room and started snoring, which caused some mirth, but the rest of the class seemed to follow along, and as I worked with them afterwards on their own essays, I realized that some of them had finally understood the connection between the thesis and the rest of the essay. This may seem obvious to us, but I realized that though my students learn how to craft a thesis statement, many do not fully grasp how one goes about developing that in the body of the essay. Rather, they seem to think that one writes a thesis and then develops body paragraphs that have something to do with the topic, but which do not necessarily develop the thesis' claim.
Have any of you had a similar experience? Perhaps we can share our challenges and successes with the cognitive apprenticeship approach?
