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Had not heard the term "Cognitive Apprenticeship" before, but it applies 💯to training/coaching coders. johntomsett.com/2017/10/22/thi…
Since apprentices can't "watch" your thinking, it's critical that we "think out loud" as much as possible when demonstrating our work.
I think that all of the Cognitive Apprenticeship methods apply: modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection and exploration.
Modeling and Coaching are straightforward. Scaffolding is probably the hardest part: providing enough direction to focus students on 1 task.
And that's the craft of creating good exercises, though tools such as Cognitive Task Analysis can help.
It's important to follow up with each student to see how they arrived at their solution, as well as what errors were made along the way.
It's so easy to "solve" a problem in coding w/o fully understanding why it worked, or -- possibly worse -- misunderstanding why it worked.
This part, Articulation as well as Reflection, ensure that the foundation the student is building is solid (no, not that SOLID).
Finally, teaching how to Explore, and not just searching in Stack Overflow, is an important skill in becoming self-sufficient.
This skill can be taught as part of the spiral increase in exercise difficulty (reducing scaffolding), and being explicit about hypotheses.
E.g., "what is the problem?", "what might the cause(s) be?", "why could those be the cause?", and only then set them loose to fix things.
That first step, clearly defining the problem, is something I often see students skip -- jumping directly to coding.
Applying a solution from one example and _transferring_ that to a similar problem is one of the hardest things to learn, and teach.
unroll plz
