Schools tend to focus on concepts, facts, and procedures of a subject, however, to operate effectively in any setting, students need three types of content: (1) problem-solving strategies, (2) goal-setting, strategic planning, monitoring, evaluation, and revision skills, and (3) learning strategies including exploring new fields or getting deeper knowledge on a familiar subject. 


Ideal Learning Environments: Context 

Teaching methods should give students the chance to observe, engage in, invent, or discover expert strategies in context. The model offers various methods such as teacher coach-offering hints, feedback, and reminders which provides support for students as they learn to carry out tasks. 


Ideal Learning Environments: Methods

 Learners need to be able to build the multiple skills required in expert performance and they discover the conditions under which they apply. This requires a sequence of increasingly complex tasks, diverse problem-solving situations, and the staging of learning so that students develop a feel for the overall terrain before attending to details. 


Ideal Learning Environments: Sequencing 

 The learning environment should reproduce the technological, social, time and motivational characteristics of real world situations where what is being learned will be used. Group work is a great way to have students learn to work together to problem-solve and carry out tasks. 


Ideal Learning Environments: Sociology 

The Collins, Brown, and Newman model has four building blocks-”content”, “methods”, “sequence”, and “sociology”- and together they define an effective learning situation with very different classrooms and roles for teachers and students. 


Pace University

Two models of teaching that were used in the past, and could be used today in replacement of the classroom model for more effective learning is the traditional apprenticeship learning model and Ideal learning environments. Both encouraged more active learning which had a greater result in students understanding. 

How do we design effective learning environments?

Berryman, Sue E., Designing Effective Learning Environments: Cognitive Apprenticeship Models, Colombia University, New York Institute on Education and the Economy, September 1991.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED337689.pdf 

Reference for Designing Effective Learning Environments: Cognitive Apprenticeship Models 

One source for ideas about effective learning environments discussed is how individuals learn in traditional apprenticeships. They noticed that school curricula tend to be a specification of practice, whereas apprenticeships arrange opportunities FOR practice. There are several characteristics of traditional apprenticeships learning including:
- Work as the driving force (progressive mastering of tasks not as a step toward a distant, symbolic goal such as a certificate), but for it’s immediate value in getting work done. 
- Mistakes are less costly.
- Learning is focused on bodily performance (involves ability to do something rather than talk about it)
- Standards of performance are embedded in the work environment 

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