Uncovering Ways of Thinking, Practicing, and Being through Decoding across Disciplines

Abstract

Decoding the Disciplines is a process designed to help instructors and educational consultants articulate expert approaches to difficult, or "bottleneck" concepts, and to find new ways to help students learn these concepts (Pace and Middendorf 2004). After identifying a bottleneck, the process continues with an interview which helps the instructor better articulate their own thinking, in order to then model it for students. Most Decoding work has focused on procedural and cognitive bottlenecks in specific disciplines such as humanities, history, and geology (e.g. Ardizzone, Breithaupt, and Gutjahr 2004;Shopkow, Diaz, Middendorf, and Pace 2013;Zhu, Rehrey, Treadwell, and Johnson 2012). The related scholarship has typically described pedagogical changes and resulting learning outcomes for students, with less attention given to the commonalities in themes that emerge across groups of experts. In the following chapter we will demonstrate how there is much to be learned by looking more closely at what Decoding interviews can uncover through applying the Decoding framework across disciplines.Because the focus of most Decoding scholarship to date has been primarily on student outcomes, there is little written about the Decoding interview process itself. Pace and Middendorf (2004) describe the interview as intellectually demanding for the interviewee. They recommend that interviewers should keep the focus on the interviewee's thinking process, use questions such as "How do you do that?", probe at the place where the interviewee cannot explain, and summarize their thinking back to them at an abstract level (Shopkow, Diaz, and Pace 2013). In one example from the History Learning Project, Shopkow (2010) used interview excerpts to illustrate how the interview process can push faculty to recognize their own tacit knowledge and generate surprising realizations that what is simple and self-evident for them is likely not so for students. This dearth of literature about the Decoding interview itself was one reason we set about to practice and study the interview process and outcomes.Decoding work has primarily focused on procedural and cognitive processes, and its utility in decoding other types of bottlenecks, and in multidisciplinary contexts, has only begun to be explored. Shopkow (2010) used Decoding interviews of cognitive and procedural bottlenecks in history to demonstrate that epistemological and emotional bottlenecks may also be unearthed and that the conceptual and ontological are inextricably linked. Similarly, Middendorf, Mickute, Saunders, Najar, Clark-Huckstep, and Pace (2015) write about revealing affective bottlenecks in history. In a multidisciplinary faculty self-study (Miller-Young, Dean, Rathburn, Pettit, Gleeson, Lexier, Calvert, and Clayton 2015) participants explored the utility of using the Decoding interview for studying faculty learning about reciprocity in service-learning. By analyzing each others' interviews within their community of practice, they found the Decoding interview to be useful not onl...

Mobile technologies in physics education in Latvian secondary schools

“…Various experts predict which technologies will be the most relevant in education in the future [4], and it is the mobile technologies that open the window for a new kind of learning and performance support, providing access to information, processes, and communication anytime and anywhere [5]. Therefore, it has become an essential and challenging issue to place students in a series of designed lessons that combine both real-world and digital-world learning resources [5], [6]. Bloom's taxonomy subdivides the academic skills that students might need into six different categories, listed below [7].…”

Beyond Decoding the Disciplines 1.0

“…Janice Miller-Young and her colleagues at this Canadian university stressed the way in which the paradigm created a "climate of trust" within the group that greatly facilitated both communication and exploration, and the word "trust" appeared no less than 26 times in their 15-page article (Miller-Young et al 2015. See also Miller-Young andBoman 2017b;Petit et al 2017;Yeo et al 2017;Miller-Young and Boman 2017c).…”

The Educational Development Interview: a guided conversation supporting professional learning about teaching practice in higher education

“…While much of the original Decoding work focused on changing teaching strategies and therefore facilitating student learning, recent work has described how the interview gives rise to changes in the instructor's thinking. In addition to helping make tacit ways of thinking explicit, the Decoding Interview can also elicit new awareness of expert ways of practicing and being (Miller-Young & Boman, 2017). For example, interviews of instructors from professional fields generated insights about how their approaches to a particular concept required not only expert knowledge but also confidence and agency, which only came with years of experience.…”