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Within the ADDIE instruction design model, this paper reports the implementation phase and the evaluation phase of teaching introductory software engineering course framed in the Cognitive Apprenticeship approach. Twelve learning objectives are classified in a 2D Bloom framework and evaluated against the result of instructional implementation, demonstrating coherent linkage between objectives, instruction and assessment. Descriptive statistics show the coverage of Cognitive Apprenticeship and high degree of acceptance from students. Analysis of learning process profile also shows consistently expanding effects on various aspects of learners, especially on teamwork. Pedagogical improvement in terms of the time allocated to individual instruction activities is also polled.

This paper examines an account of a practitioner-initiated transformation of workplace-based social relationship within a grassroots adult education institution. This tripartite relationship among adult students, staff and teachers, abbreviated as AST, is a major driving force for activities and missionary functioning of the XinZhuang Community University (XZ-CU) and thus constitutes an indication of conjoint collaboration. Grafted from historical context and the development stage of AST, the initiative and the intervention focused on redefining AST relationship from a distributed leadership perspective and represents a democratic core and alternative to school leadership that would render new opportunity to create ‘democratic structures and processes' that a Democratic School advocated. This work has led to the conception and practice of joint educational experiment with elementary schools. The objectives of this research (as a professional engagement) are two-fold: first, to outline the major observables of this engagement, including reviews of facilitating the evolution of AST relationship in past three years. Second, with the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and its variant as the theoretical lens for framing and understanding the phenomena, we then identify the critical contradictions and concerted efforts of transformation, along with outcomes that emerged and artefacts employed, as well as further impacts of school reform on structures and processes.

Cognitive apprenticeship is meshed with teaching the introductory software engineering. We sketch the idea and an exploratory experiment in a team-based process-oriented software project track in the fall of 2005. Several preliminary results are exciting while detailed examination should also be further pursued.