Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks: Decode the Critical Thinking of Your Discipline

Decoding the Disciplines is a widely-used and proven methodology that prompts teachers to identify the bottlenecks – the places where students get stuck – that impede learners’ paths to expert thinking in a discipline. The process is based on recognizing the gap between novice learning and expert thinking, and uncovering tacit knowledge that may not be made manifest in teaching.

Through “decoding”, implicit expert knowledge can be turned into explicit mental tasks, and made available to students. This book presents a seven-step process for uncovering bottlenecks and determining the most effective way to enable students to surmount them.

The authors explain how to apply the seven steps of Decoding the Disciplines – how to identify bottlenecks, unpack the critical thinking of experts, teach students how to do this kind of thinking, and how to evaluate the degree to which students have learned to do it. They provide in-depth descriptions of each step and, at the end of each chapter, at least one exercise the reader can do on his or her own. Because the decoding process works well with groups, they also provide exercises for leading groups through the process, making available to informal groups as well as groups led by professional developers, the tools to transform their understanding of teaching and learning by getting the student view that they refer to as “the bottleneck perspective”.

Because it focuses on the mental moves that underlie the cognitive competencies we want students to develop, spelling out what critical thinking consists of for any field, the methodology helps teachers to get beyond focus on content delivery and transmission and provides criteria to select from the bewildering array of teaching tools the methods most appropriate to what they are teaching.

This is a book for faculty who want their students to develop disciplinary forms of reasoning, and are moreover interested in a methodology with the potential to transform and reinvigorate their teaching. It is particularly suitable for use in communities of practice, and should be indispensable for any one engaged in cross-disciplinary teaching, as it enables co-teachers to surface each other’s tacit knowledge and disciplinary assumptions.

Joan Middendorf is Lead Instructional Consultant in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and Adjunct Professor in Educational Leadership at Indiana University.Joan Middendorf’s specialty lies in leading faculty to help make disciplinary ways of thinking available to students in such groups as a Media School, Latino Studies Program and NSF-funded STEM groups at universities around the world. With David Pace she developed and published the “Decoding the Disciplines” model. As co-director of the History Learning Project (HLP), she has focused on emotional bottlenecks to learning. Along with Professors Diaz, Pace, and Shopkow the HLP won the 2008 Menges Research Award from the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education and the 2009 McGraw-Hill – Magna Publications (Weimer) Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award. Among her many publications, she was first author on the 2015 “What’s feeling got to do with it? Decoding emotional bottlenecks in the history classroom,” which appeared in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 14.

Leah Shopkow is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University.Leah Shopkow examines medieval historiography in her disciplinary work, which provided a natural segue into history pedagogy. A founding co-director and the PI of the History Learning Project (HLP), her recent publications include “The History Learning Project ‘Decodes’ a Discipline: The Union of Epistemology and Teaching” in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines (2013) as and “From Bottlenecks to Epistemology in History: Changing the Conversation about the Teaching of History in Colleges and Universities” in Changing the Conversation about Higher Education (2103) as first author. With Arlene Díaz she has written “A Tale of Two Thresholds,” in Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2017) and has had an article entitled “How Many Sources Do I Need?” accepted by The History Teacher. Her critical edition of the Chronicle of Andres (c. 1220-1234, Pas-de-Calais) has been accepted by Corpus Christianorum.