Word: apprenticeships
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...word evokes quaint images of cabinetmakers or alchemists teaching eager youths the secrets of their trade. Yet apprenticeship -- the acquisition of knowledge through practice in the presence of a master -- is a time-tested teaching method whose applications go far beyond the shop floor. The principle is at work every time someone takes a total-immersion language lesson, follows a doctor on his rounds to learn how to practice medicine, or tags along with a crack dealer to learn the ropes of the drug trade. In fact, a body of scientists and educators maintains that it is the primary means...
Faced with mounting evidence of the failure of efforts to pour information into students' minds, a number of educators and researchers would like to see more apprenticeship in the classroom. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: "Schools are not organized according to the way most people learn. We might be more successful if we structured learning in schools more like the way things are done in the real world -- with apprenticeship-type programs connecting abstract symbols to the solution of real problems...
...Apprenticeship has produced promising results in various experimental programs. Techniques devised by Ann Brown and Annemarie Palincsar, while doing education research at the University of Illinois, raised reading-comprehension , scores in a Springfield seventh-grade class from 20% to 80% in 20 days. The method was to make the children approach a text the way a teacher does: by formulating questions, summarizing, predicting what will come next and isolating problems...
...know each other, each is more likely to condone false images of other organizations and their members. This, in turn, bolsters campus racism and other bigotries. Second, student groups may repeat mistakes if they cannot learn from the experience of others. Established institutions such as The Crimson have an apprenticeship system that preserves institutional memory. But even The Crimson's executives have sometimes had to learn essential lessons the hard way. Groups that are new, reviving or branching out in fresh directions have even more to learn from others' experiences...
From his art-student days (if one is to believe The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, his charmingly mythomanic autobiography), he struck everyone, especially himself, as a prodigy. Around 1929, after moving to Paris and serving an apprenticeship in various realist and cubist styles, he saw that realism, when pressed to a photographic extreme, could subvert one's sense of reality. He therefore used what he called "tricks of eye fooling" to invoke "sublime hierarchies of thought...