Although my formal education _for_ teaching is almost non-existent, I've
been in the situation of training other people - or being trained - many
times in work situations, and to a lesser extent teaching, so I make this
offering in the spirit of naive empiricism.
In my experience, both learning and teaching, the idea of finding
"universal principles" is counter-productive. Every type of activity
requires a slightly (or majorly!) different approach. The context in
which the learning takes place is also a major issue. Learning in school
with the ultimate aim of getting a grade, i.e. certified in the abstract,
is different from teaching someone on the job with a need to get that
person functioning in a particular activity as soon as possible.
The use of "guided learning" vs. "direct instruction" seems to me to be
another unproductive dichotomy. In any given learning partnership/task
the determining factor is whether the student is "getting it" or not,
which itself can only be measured by criteria specific to that task (and
sometimes the specific situation.) The senior partner has to continually
monitor what the junior is doing and gauge the next phase of the process
accordingly - whether guided, when things are going well, or just telling
her/him outright when things are stalled. The senior's whole outlook has
to have a kind of Zen-like fluidity, with the quality of being both
within the situation as a participant and outside of it while evaluating
what the next step should be.
This means, of course, a lot of work and thinking on the part of the
senior, which may be why it's not so popular for teachers with
over-crowded classrooms. Additionally, In a "real-world" task, besides
pedagogical considerations, there is usually a substantive job to get
done, and the junior may actually be making a necessary contribution,
making it even less like a class-room situation.
What I think I'm trying to say is that apprenticeship is not a thing but
a process, and each process has to be considered in terms of what is
being sought, who is involved, and what the situation is. There is no
model of a "general" situation for which a "best" solution can be found.
We will find ourselves up a theoretical dead-end with no alternative but
to take a look at the specific situation.
Perhaps we can come up with guidelines to help make choices, but the
bottom line is that there is no alternative to exercising individual
judgment and personal responsibility for our own, hopefully informed,
choices throughout the course of an apprenticeship process.
Perhaps being the senior in an apprenticeship is something that can only
be learned by apprenticeship.
RacheL Heckert