Solution:
I am not sure how many people have been using Laravel 4 in this post, since this post, but if you are looking to include partials or separate your view types you can do it with @includes
for example, if you want a partials folder for your header, footer, sidebar etc
create a directory for the partials under
app/views/partials
Then create a partial
app/views/partials/navigation.blade.php
Then in your master template file add the line
@include('partials.navigation')
That is all it takes.
** Bonus you can also pass data to a partial or include nested partials within a partial