The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm: Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning
178
The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm: Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253024589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/27/2017 |
| Series: | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 178 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm
Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning
By David Pace, Jennifer Meta Robinson, Whitney M. Schlegel, Mary Taylor Huber
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 David PaceAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02458-9
CHAPTER 1
FINDING THE BOTTLENECK
The Strategic Importance of Bottlenecks
Teaching is, of necessity, a strategic undertaking. Time and resources are limited; they must be focused with precision and skill. To be effective, teachers need to know where and when to intervene. They must have at their disposal an array of effective teaching techniques, but they also need a broad framework to determine which interventions will produce the maximum effect on learning in a particular situation.
Decoding the Disciplines provides such a strategic framework. It offers a context for decision making within which instructors, educational developers, and college administrators can determine the most appropriate course of action. Decoding is not in itself a teaching technique, but instead a framework within which to decide which techniques are most appropriate at a particular moment. As such, it provides a means for taking full advantage of the flowering of pedagogical thinking that has occurred in the last thirty years.
At the core of Decoding is the concept of the bottleneck. In fields such as engineering and computer science, the restriction of the flow of liquid at the neck of a bottle has been used as a metaphor for those places in a complex system where performance is most apt to be restricted. In the context of the scholarship of teaching and learning, the term indicates those places in a course where the stream of learning is particularly apt to be obstructed. While students may move easily through parts of a course, there can be other places where large numbers of them encounter obstacles to learning that they find very difficult to overcome. Being unable to master a particular obstacle may not in itself immediately lead to failure, but as bottlenecks mount up, students become increasingly confused, less and less able to perform the basic tasks required in the course.
The decision to begin by looking at the places where students get stuck may seem so obvious that it does not need to be stated. But in fact, a great deal of the effort that is devoted to improving instruction ignores this crucial step. It is quite easy to become so enamored of a new teaching technique that one begins trying to apply it everywhere. As John Bransford and his colleagues have put it, "Asking which teaching technique is best is analogous to asking which tool is best — a hammer, a screwdriver, a knife, or pliers. In teaching as in carpentry, the selection of tools depends on the task at hand and the materials one is working with" (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000, 22). The first step in the decoding process, therefore, focuses attention on the task, not on the tool box.
Beginning with bottlenecks has two other important functions. First, it serves as a counterweight to content. Academics love their subject matter, and the impulse to share it can easily overwhelm the intention to help students master basic skills. Learning problems, however, generally arise not from a lack of access to content but from students' inability to process that content once it has been obtained. Concentrating on bottlenecks keeps attention focused on what students have to be able to do, not what they have to remember.
Second, this approach narrows the instructor's field of vision in a productive manner. Faced with students who are not learning, we are often tempted to try to rush in and fix everything at once. Unfortunately, global efforts to change everything about a course are apt to be unfocused, and attempts to simultaneously instill all of the elements of critical thinking often confuse both the instructor and the student. Moreover, such complex goals are generally impossible to assess and refine because it is impossible to know which interventions are or are not working.
By contrast, the instructor using decoding operates like Adam Smith's celebrated pin manufacturer who discovered that, by breaking production up into its constituent parts, each aspect of the process could be analyzed and perfected. By concentrating on a particular bottleneck, an instructor is more able to identify the mental operations that are required for success in this area, to devise strategies to model these specific skills, to create opportunities for students to practice them, and to assess the ways in which these efforts do or do not help students overcome this obstacle to learning. As an added bonus, we have found that when students really master the steps needed to get past a bottleneck, they quite often gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the discipline that allows them to move past other potential impediments to learning on their own.
Bottlenecks and Threshold Concepts
This focus on bottlenecks to learning emerged from the rich conceptual stew that has been simmering in discussions about higher education since the 1980s and 1990s. The increased attention to critical thinking played a crucial role, by shifting focus from the transmission of information to the engendering of key mental processes in students (see, for example, Kurfiss 1988). This transformed the significance of student errors; learning probtems that had often been dismissed as a consequence of students' cognitive deficits or unwillingness to work now came to be seen as the result of a failure to adequately introduce students to required ways of thinking. Similarly, the shift of focus from teaching to learning, described by Robert Barr and John Tagg in their influential article on the "learning paradigm" (1995), automatically set the stage for greater concern with those places where learning was not occurring.
At the same time, there was increased concern with learning in the disciplines. It became clear that in the university context learning is almost always "local" — that is, it is conditioned by the specific epistemology and procedures of a particular academic sphere (Donald 2002; Pace and Middendorf 2004; Shulman 1986, 1993; Tobias 1992–93). As Lee Shulman put it in his description of pedagogical content knowledge, "if different disciplines value particular forms of evidence and argument, narrative, and explanation, then their pedagogies should reflect the same forms of representalion and exposition" (2002, vii). The perceived need to make the emerging field of the scholarship of teaching and learning available to instructors in a broad range of fields also played a role in this new emphasis on disciplinary forms of knowledge. As Mary Taylor Huber and Sherwyn P. Morreale put it, "For good or for ill, scholars of teaching and learning must address field-specific issues if they are going to be heard in their own disciplines, and they must speak in a language that their colleagues understand" (2002, 2). This focus on the disciplinary conditions for learning was reinforced by the notion that learning should be viewed as a kind of apprenticeship in which students are drawn into the cognitive, practical, and ethical practices of a discipline (Brown, Collins, and Duguid 1989). Knowing, thus, came to be conceptualized within this approach as a form of doing, and this doing varied from field to field.
Within this flow of new ways of understanding learning, there emerged a sense that more attention needed to be paid to places where students get stuck. Starting in the late 1990s, educational theorists and scholars of teaching and learning began to develop theories of difficulty in which obstacles to learning were treated not as a problem to be swept away as quickly as possible but as an intellectual puzzle to be solved (Bass 1999). David Perkins's "troublesome knowledge" (1999, 2006), Jan Meyer and Ray Land's "Threshold concepts" (2003, 2006), and my and Joan Middendorf's Decoding the Disciplines process (Pace and Middendorf 2004) all developed during this period simultaneously, but independently, in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States.
The threshold concepts model is particularly relevant to those interested in decoding, and the relationship between the two approaches is worth exploring briefly. (Readers who are less interested in the theoretical underpinnings of these ways of thinking about learning should feel free to skip to the next section of this chapter.) Scholars focusing on threshold concepts have identified a number of essential ideas that are crucial to understanding particular disciplines. If such concepts are not mastered, students' further progress in the field is blocked. Such concepts are transformative (they involve a fundamental shift in a student's understanding of the subject), integrative (they reveal hidden connections), and probably irreversible (Meyer and Land, 2003, 2005, 2006; O'Mahony et al. 2014). Those working within the threshold paradigm have emphasized the emotional costs that often accompany such intellectual transformations.
Decoding the Disciplines and threshold concepts are complementary approaches to understanding student difficulties, and practitioners of each model can benefit from the other. A more extended discussion of the relationship between the two approaches has been presented by Leah Shopkow (2010), whose work in this area has greatly influenced my own formulations. But at the core there are five essential differences between the two paradigms.
1. The bottlenecks with which decoding begins occupy a larger conceptual territory than do threshold concepts. As my colleague Joan Middendorf first recognized, threshold concepts are a subset of a larger territory of bottlenecks. Some bottlenecks do involve central issues in particular disciplines and can be considered threshold concepts, but others may arise from other issues. Decoding might consider obstacles to learning such as a student's inability to understand how to process feedback on exams or to move beyond the standard answers to a problem in order to generate alternative solutions. It also deals with emotional obstacles to learning (see chapter 6). Thus, while all threshold concepts are bottlenecks, all bottlenecks are not threshold concepts.
2. Bottlenecks are not necessarily as transformative as threshold concepts. Threshold concepts are conceptualized as central portals through which all students must pass to master a particular discipline. Students who successfully manage this difficult passage are transformed, and the process is irreversible. They will never again be able to think in the ways in which they did before this transformation. By contrast, some bottlenecks have these qualities, but others do not have such revolutionary consequences. It is necessary for students to get past them, but they are more like rough patches on a long trail than they are life-changing alterations to students' worldviews.
3. As the word concept suggests, the search for threshold concepts generally centers on what students have to know, whereas decoding is much more concerned with what students have to do. In some cases this is a subtle distinction, but it is an important one. Decoding consistently focuses on the mental operations that students must perform, not on the intellectual concepts that they must learn. Its goal is conceived in terms of verbs, not nouns.
4. Threshold concepts generally begin with the knowledge of how a discipline works as it is consciously understood by experts in the field, whereas decoding problematizes the discovery of mental operations within a field. Threshold concepts tend to focus on concepts, such as marginal utility in economics, whose importance is clear to virtually anyone in the discipline. Within decoding, by contrast, the crucial mental operations generally only become fully clear after a systematic process of exploration unearths crucial steps that may not have been conscious in the mind of the expert at the beginning of the procedure (see chapter 2). This distinction is not absolute, but to understand the differences between the approaches, it is important to recognize that practitioners of threshold concepts will generally be working within the preexisting concepts of a discipline, whereas decoding may generate information about the nature of learning in the field that was not previously recognized. (For an extended discussion of this difference, see Shopkow 2010.)
5. The concern with bottlenecks is only the first step in the decoding process, whereas those working within the threshold concept model must turn elsewhere for concrete steps to address the learning problem. Decoding moves beyond the analysis of student difficulties to suggest a series of practical steps to help students overcome obstacles to learning, to assess the success of these interventions, and to share what has been learned with others. Thus, those working within the threshold concepts framework may choose to draw upon the later steps of decoding to address the learning problem at hand.
The two processes are complementary, and both have provided powerful ways of framing student difficulty that are potentially transformative for both the instructor and the students. Those working within the decoding paradigm can benefit from threshold concepts' focus on the learning that is most central to a discipline and on the emotional impact of such potentially wrenching intellectual and personal transformations. Conversely, the second step of the decoding process can make explicit hidden disciplinary ways of operating that would otherwise have been missed. This is particularly important in fields like the humanities, where there is generally less explicit consensus on key concepts and procedures. Moreover, decoding provides concrete strategies for helping students overcome obstacles to learning in any field.
The compatibility of decoding and threshold concepts has been demonstrated by Randy Bass and his colleagues, who created a faculty development program that merged the two approaches (Bass et al. 2011). In a subsequent article Kenneth Bain and Randy Bass refer to the "natural compatibility" between the two approaches and add that "this is a particularly rich marriage of the two approaches, primarily because threshold concept theory lacks a pedagogical design or faculty development elements; similarly, the instructional bottleneck approach [in decoding] — being strong in design and development — can break down intellectual activities into smaller manageable parts without losing sight of the more complex integrative picture" (2012, 200–201).
Defining Bottlenecks
The decoding process is usually more effective when the bottleneck is defined with some precision. The later steps of the process can lead to a sharpening of the understanding of the obstacle to learning, but it is still more efficient to make the initial statement of the problem as clear and distinct as possible. In formulating the bottleneck it is best to avoid disciplinary jargon and to define the issue in terms that would be understandable to any educated person. This not only makes the nature of the problem clear to those from other disciplines who can provide essential help in the subsequent steps, but it also makes it less likely that crucial elements of the process will remain hidden.
It is also better to define bottlenecks relatively narrowly. Thus, the commonly stated complaint of instructors that "students can't interpret texts" is so vague and general that it does not provide a particularly effective point of departure for an exercise in decoding. A more effective approach would be to formulate the problem less globally, as in, "Students want to go directly to interpreting a text without first getting a good grasp of a text's content. They need to observe before they interpret, but they are constantly skipping a thoughtful observation stage." With this beginning one could easily proceed to the later stages of decoding and define precisely what experts in the field do when they observe a text thoughtfully, and then to model this for students.
Here are a few of the bottlenecks that have been identified in the growing literature on decoding:
• Political science. Students often have difficulty recognizing the tension between majority rule and minority rights (Bernstein 2012).
• Music history. Many students have difficulty identifying the features that distinguish one musical style or genre from another (Burkholder 2011).
• Law. Students can be mesmerized by the sensational details of a case and miss the underlying legal principles (Somers 2014).
• Criminal justice. Students tend to view learning about research methods as an unnecessary part of their training (Sundt 2010).
• Math education. Students have difficulty developing a sequence of tasks used to teach a new concept (Schultz and Lovin 2011).
• Journalism. Students have difficulty generating story ideas (Haney 2015).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm by David Pace, Jennifer Meta Robinson, Whitney M. Schlegel, Mary Taylor Huber. Copyright © 2017 David Pace. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction: An Overview of Decoding the Disciplines1. Find the Bottleneck2. Step 2: Decoding the Disciplinary Unconscious 3. Modeling Operations4. Practice and Feedback5. Motivation and Emotional Bottlenecks6. Assessment7. Sharing8. The Future of DecodingEpilogue NotesList of ReferencesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Case studies, clear examples, well outlined strategies, and insightful writing make Decoding the Disciplines an understandable and accessible entry into an essential topic that will be usable for many teachers. This book should be required reading for beginning college instructors.