2016 Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Learning In and Across Disciplines
Nov 10-12, 2016
Keynotes
Plenary #1
Why Don’t They Get it? Decoding the Gap Between Faculty and Student Thinking
David Pace (click for bio)
Professor Emeritus, Indiana University
President, International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History
With Joan Middendorf, Pace created Decoding the Disciplines, a new approach to increasing student learning in college classes. Faculty using this method begin by defining a bottleneck in one of their courses, i.e. a place where the learning of significant numbers of students is interrupted. They then go through a systematic process of exploration in which they define as precisely as possible just what experts in the field or successful students do to get past this obstacle. Once these steps have been defined, they are modeled for students, opportunities for practice and feedback are created, and the learning is assessed. This approach has been used to good effect in a wide variety of disciplines in a dozen countries, and it has become one of the central methodologies of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
The very future of the societies in which we live depends on college instructors learning to share increasingly demanding subjects to increasingly diverse groups of students. To respond to this challenge, we must bring the kind of sustained intellectual inquiry that we are accustomed to in our disciplinary work to bear on the places where student learning is blocked. We must systematically explore what makes our fields difficult for many students and analyze the processes that they must master to function effectively in our disciplines. This talk will describe the Decoding the Disciplines model and share multiple examples of how, by making conscious the mental operations that we do automatically and carefully sharing these with students, we can provide them with the tools they will need to shape the future.
Plenary #2
The Decoding Interview: Live and Unplugged
With commentary and discussion facilitated by: David Pace (click for bio)
With Joan Middendorf, Pace created Decoding the Disciplines, a new approach to increasing student learning in college classes. Faculty using this method begin by defining a bottleneck in one of their courses, i.e. a place where the learning of significant numbers of students is interrupted. They then go through a systematic process of exploration in which they define as precisely as possible just what experts in the field or successful students do to get past this obstacle. Once these steps have been defined, they are modeled for students, opportunities for practice and feedback are created, and the learning is assessed. This approach has been used to good effect in a wide variety of disciplines in a dozen countries, and it has become one of the central methodologies of the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Scholars of teaching and learning around the world and in many disciplines have been using the Decoding the Disciplines process to make explicit the mental operations that students must master to succeed. Teachers, as experts in their disciplines, often hold this knowledge in tacit and implicit ways that are not easily accessible to novices, resulting in "bottlenecks" to learning. A key step towards addressing bottlenecks is a Decoding interview in which teachers uncover and unpack crucial thinking with the help of two interviewers outside their field. The interview can yield important insights for teachers, generate data for SoTL work, and also play an important role in developing the community and trust necessary for collaborative teaching and research projects. To illustrate how an interview unfolds, this plenary will feature a live Decoding interview conducted by experienced Decoders from Mount Royal University, with follow-up commentary and discussion facilitated by Dr. David Pace.
For additional information please contact the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University: sotlinstitute@mtroyal.ca or 403.440.5503.
© Copyright ISOTL. All Rights Reserved. Design by Clio Data Solutions.