You’re right, of course, about ‘story’ being a conceptual hand-me-down. But it’s also a conceptual pick-me-up :)

(Added a little later:)

From another post here that mentioned Building Expertise, here’s classically-trained violinist Dave Greenberg, talking about learning something like Cape Breton Island fiddling:

If you’re coming at it from age 30 from Mississippi or wherever, you’ve missed thirty of the most important years, especially that first ten, not listening and being immersed, in a natural way, to this music. So it’s not part of your first language….

You can’t just say, I’m going to listen to recordings and I’m going to figure out how they’re doing the rhythms. First you have to say, I’m at a huge disadvantage here because I’m learning something like Sanskrit. You just can’t say this is all fiddle tunes and it’s all basically the same. You’re never going to get it that way….

That’s why most people do believe you have to have it in the blood and be brought up there — because that’s the only natural way of doing it.

Ruth Clark has another very useful and interesting book called Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement (2008), also published by Pfeiffer. Much of the content will feel very familiar to someone who has read e-Learning, but there is some additional research that she expounds upon and a slightly different slant to the book overall: expertise and performance improvement, instead of e-learning.

I’d quibble a bit with the label “story” for a worked example. The worked example is (or should be) built deliberately to support the skill in question. My worry is that “story” is a bit loose; like “objective,” it’s a conceptual hand-me-down that people slip onto nearly anything.

Your context may be different, of course. An expert at one client used “war story” to mean “detailed example that makes concrete the thing we’re talking about.” To me, “war story” is one of those interminable tangents: “We did something like that back in 89, or maybe 88. The plant manager in Columbus — I think his name was O’Brien, or maybe it was Kowalski — anyway, he was having some trouble with inventory control. Now, the inventory supervisor was this guy from Oregon…”

The Clark/Mayer book is excellent, clearly written, and packed with references to research. You might want to get a copy.

Another thing to add might be ESOL’s Task-based Language Learning approach [wikipedia link]

Although it often got diluted into another variant of project learning, the original idea was to have learners complete tasks after seeing/hearing them modeled by native speakers. It never really caught on as a mainstream approach because – in the distant past, like 10 years ago – it was difficult to find/make recordings of native speakers.

The idea of Cognitive Apprenticeship is a new one to me. But it really fits in with my current Education as a Craft obsession – thanks. I can’t help thinking that we’ve lost the art of having apprentices. Partly because, ironically, we call things Worked Examples when they might be better framed as stories?

Worked Examples (and that killer idea of lowering extraneous cognitive load) are a neat additional strut to my learning schema.