The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm

David Pace

Description

Teaching and learning in a college setting has never been more challenging. How can instructors reach out to their students and fully engage them in the conversation? Applicable to multiple disciplines, the Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm offers a radically new model for helping students respond to the challenges of college and provides a framework for understanding why students find academic life so arduous. Teachers can help their pupils overcome obstacles by identifying bottlenecks to learning and systematically exploring the steps needed to overcome these obstacles. Often, experts find it difficult to define the mental operations necessary to master their discipline because they have become so automatic that they are invisible. However, once these mental operations have been made explicit, the teacher can model them for students, create opportunities for practice and feedback, manage additional emotional obstacles, assess results, and share what has been learned with others.

Preface
Introduction: An Overview of Decoding the Disciplines
1. Find the Bottleneck
2. Step 2: Decoding the Disciplinary Unconscious
3. Modeling Operations
4. Practice and Feedback
5. Motivation and Emotional Bottlenecks
6. Assessment
7. Sharing
8. The Future of Decoding
Epilogue
Notes
List of References
Index

Sujets

• EDUCATION
• Higher
• Level
• School
• Higher education

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 27 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253024657
• Langue: English

Extrait

DECODING the DISCIPLINES PARADIGM
SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Jennifer Meta Robinson, Whitney M. Schlegel, and Mary Taylor Huber, editors
DECODING the DISCIPLINES PARADIGM
Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning
DAVID PACE
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by David Pace
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02453-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02458-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02465-7 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
To those who are at the core of everything I do: Georg ann, Kate, and Griffin
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Overview of Decoding the Disciplines
1
Finding the Bottleneck
2
Decoding the Disciplinary Unconscious
3
Modeling Operations
4
Practice and Feedback
5
Motivation and Emotional Bottlenecks
6
Assessment
7
Sharing
8
The Future of Decoding

Epilogue

Notes

References

Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
A UTHORSHIP IS SUCH a troubled concept. Our cultural traditions require a hero, just as our sociopolitical system focuses attention on the lone entrepreneur. Thus, we place a name on the cover of every book and imagine an author, operating in isolation, who brought a set of ideas into existence ex nihilo. But such moments of solitary creation are, at most, relatively rare occurrences. We are a social species, and we think best when we think together.
These considerations are particularly relevant at the beginning of this book, because the we behind it is much more powerful than the I . The community that contributed to its creation has numbered well over a hundred people, but at the core of this effort was the impressive work of Joan Middendorf, who worked alongside me to create the Freshman Learning Project ( FLP ) at Indiana University-Bloomington, and of Arlene D az and Leah Shopkow, who joined us in IU s History Learning Project ( HLP ). And beyond that inner circle, the faculty fellows and the PhD students who worked with the FLP and the HLP made great contributions to the development of the Decoding the Disciplines process. The many participants in workshops around the world contributed examples and participated in the interview process; more recently, teams of scholars of teaching and learning at other universities around the world are moving the approach beyond its original limits.
At every moment from its conception to its emergence as a complex, articulated approach to facilitating learning, this has been a shared project. A comment by a fellow in the FLP might set in motion a chain of thoughts that began to take shape months later over a luncheon of the HLP ; that conversation generated a classroom lesson in one of our courses that led to the formulation of a new principle, and a question from the audience at a workshop in another country provided a metaphor that nailed down the concept. Thus, it should never be assumed that everything in this book that is not specifically ascribed to one of my colleagues is the result of my individual ruminations.
Within this shared conceptual space we have each brought special experiences and skills to the table that have allowed our team to gain insights that would most likely have been impossible to attain in isolation. As time has passed, however, we have come to see decoding in somewhat different ways and to describe it in slightly different language. Thus, there is nothing canonical about the precise form of decoding as it is presented in this book. Others in our team would have used different metaphors and examples, emphasized different aspects of the process, and in some cases drawn different conclusions. This is already visible in the work that we have produced and will undoubtedly be even more visible in the future. This is a sign of the vitality and richness of the approach, and any attempt to impose an orthodoxy on decoding will only weaken it.
More than a decade has passed since the Decoding the Disciplines process was introduced in a special issue of the journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning in 2004. The paradigm has expanded in so many directions in the intervening years that it is time to draw together the ideas and strategies that have emerged since that publication. In addition to my work, Joan Middendorf and Leah Shopkow will be publishing Decoding the Disciplines: How to Help Students Learn Critical Thinking , a practical introduction to the decoding process, in which instructors and educational developers will be presented with the concrete steps needed to implement this approach in courses and in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Leah, Joan, Arlene, and I are working on a detailed study in which we will use decoding to examine teaching and learning history. A team at Mount Royal University, including Jennifer Boman, Genevieve Currie, Ron MacDonald, Janice Miller-Young, Michelle Yeo, and Stephanie Zettel, have produced Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning across Disciplines , another volume on the application of the decoding paradigm, which will appear in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning series, and scholars of teaching throughout the world are generating presentations and articles that further articulate the model.
My own chief contribution to this literature is the present volume. The choice of words, the emphasis, and in many cases the particular spin given to Decoding the Disciplines in the pages that follow are mine, and I take full responsibility for any errors of reasoning or infelicities of presentation that may have occurred in the writing of this work. But, while the words that follow are mine, very few of them would have found their way to the page without a process of collective reasoning and exploration over the last decade. I have gained more than I can express from this community, and what I have learned from my collaborators has been the greatest gift that I have received in my professional life.
As a historian, I can best represent the nature of this shared enterprise by offering a brief history of Decoding the Disciplines. I am writing, of necessity from a limited perspective, and I am certain that I have not done justice to the contributions of all those who have been involved. But, I believe that it is important to provide readers with some sense of the process by which these ideas developed. (Readers who are not so inflicted with historicity may feel free to skip to the book s introduction, though they should be warned that an understanding of the basic challenges that brought us to this work may help in understanding its implications.)
My Personal Journey to Decoding
My path to this book began in the spring of 1988, when I was jolted out of pedagogical complacency by a single sentence uttered by Craig Nelson. Craig is one of the elder sages of the world of teaching, and I have had the privilege of learning from him for four decades. But at that particular moment he simply pointed out that most of what we call teaching is really sorting. Students who have been pre-educated are praised and judged to be worthy, whereas those who arrive with more minimal preparation are dismissed as lazy or stupid. Teaching, by contrast, would involve actually giving students the tools that they need to succeed in our disciplines.
Before that moment I had had some sense of the injustice that resulted from ineffective teaching, but the clarity and precision of this comment caused a great deal of soul searching on my part. I had to admit that, despite a decade and a half of working on my teaching of history courses at Indiana University Bloomington, I, too, was still sorting students. I had already begun to explore literature on learning, and I suspected that something as simple as responding to phrases such as compare and contrast or support this argument required cognitive abilities that had not been cultivated in many of my students. My exams required the kind of complex mental operations that William Perry s work (1970) had demonstrated were only mastered by most students in their later years at Harvard University. And yet I was assuming mastery of such abilities in courses at a large state university.
I had to face the fact that in my own role as a teacher I was reinforcing all the inequalities that I deplored in rants about the injustice of our society. Students arrived at the door of my classroom with radically different levels of preparation. The children of privilege had been preeducated and would succeed in society no matter what occurred in my course. But others had suffered from years of pedagogical neglect and were ill-prepared for the challenges they will face in my course. By requiring skills that I was not teaching, I was inadvertently reinforcing and legitimizing the notion that some of my students counted and others