Decoding the Disciplines - User contributions [en]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-15T20:13:12Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows used the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this knowledge is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the Decoding interviews had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both within and outside their disciplines. But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://youtu.be/uTBQkycMc3g Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 2025 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* Excerpts from a panel at the September 2025 FALCON Conference in which teachers describe how the Decoding Transitions to College Project helped them reshape introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.(Thanks to FALCON and FACET for making these videos available.)
** [https://youtu.be/U95d1roBXyk Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course]
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
[[File:Interview Notes Large.jpg|thumb|Notes from a Decoding intrerview]]
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided further indications of the impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effectively compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

=== Spreading What Has Been Learned ===
The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project has not been limited to the teachers who participated directly in the program as fellows. As is clearly visible in the videos above from the Decoding webinar and the FALCON conference, the teachers participating in the program are actively involved in sharing what they have learned. In the three years following the first year of the project, the fellows have published several articles and have made presentations in venues ranging from departmental meetings to international conferences -- all based on their experiences in this program. And on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and in multiple high schools across the state, veterans of the program have spontaneously created local faculty learning communities in which they are sharing the Decoding process and conducting Decoding interviews with their colleagues.

== More information about the Program ==
The initial Decoding Transitions to College Project was directed by David Pace and Rebecca Itow and received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.

A fuller description of this program may be found in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, [https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

More information about Decoding the Disciplines may be found elsewhere on this Wiki and on the Decoding website at https://decoding.webflow.io/.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-15T19:28:14Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows used the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this knowledge is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the Decoding interviews had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both within and outside their disciplines. But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://youtu.be/uTBQkycMc3g Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 2025 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College Project describe the Decoding process and discuss how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (Thanks to FALCON and FACET for their assistance in making these videos available.)
** [https://youtu.be/U95d1roBXyk Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course]
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]
** [https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2358907/pages/decoding-across-the-high-school-slash-college-frontier-to-understand-our-students-experience The entire FALCON presentation] (including a general description of Decoding including the sections on biology and chemistry linked above.)

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
[[File:Interview Notes Large.jpg|thumb|Notes from a Decoding intrerview]]
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided further indications of the impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effectively compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

=== Spreading What Has Been Learned ===
The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project has not been limited to the teachers who participated directly in the program as fellows. As is clearly visible in the videos above from the Decoding webinar and the FALCON conference, the teachers participating in the program are actively involved in sharing what they have learned. In the three years following the first year of the project, the fellows have published several articles and have made presentations in venues ranging from departmental meetings to international conferences -- all based on their experiences in this program. And on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and in multiple high schools across the state, veterans of the program have spontaneously created local faculty learning communities in which they are sharing the Decoding process and conducting Decoding interviews with their colleagues.

== More information about the Program ==
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, [https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-15T14:24:55Z

Dpace: Added image

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://youtu.be/uTBQkycMc3g Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe the Decoding process and describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (Thanks to FALCON and FACET for their assistance in making these videos available.)
** [https://youtu.be/U95d1roBXyk Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course]
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]
** [https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2358907/pages/decoding-across-the-high-school-slash-college-frontier-to-understand-our-students-experience The entire FALCON presentation] (including a general description of Decoding including the sections on biology and chemistry linked above.)

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
[[File:Interview Notes Large.jpg|thumb|Notes from a Decoding intrerview]]
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

=== Spreading What Has Been Learned ===
The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project has not been limited to the teachers who participated directly in the program as fellows. As is clearly visible in the videos above from the Decoding webinar and the FALCON conference, the teachers participating in the program are actively involved in sharing what they have learned. In the three years following the first year of the project, the fellows have published several articles and have made presentations in venues ranging from departmental meetings to international conferences -- all based on their experiences. And on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and in multiple high schools across the state, veterans of the program have spontaneously created local faculty learning communities in which they are sharing the Decoding process and conducting Decoding interviews with their colleagues.

== More information about the Program ==
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-15T14:22:16Z

Dpace: Add texts

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://youtu.be/uTBQkycMc3g Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe the Decoding process and describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (Thanks to FALCON and FACET for their assistance in making these videos available.)
** [https://youtu.be/U95d1roBXyk Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course]
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]
** [https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2358907/pages/decoding-across-the-high-school-slash-college-frontier-to-understand-our-students-experience The entire FALCON presentation] (including a general description of Decoding including the sections on biology and chemistry linked above.)

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

=== Spreading What Has Been Learned ===
The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project has not been limited to the teachers who participated directly in the program as fellows. As is clearly visible in the videos above from the Decoding webinar and the FALCON conference, the teachers participating in the program are actively involved in sharing what they have learned. In the three years following the first year of the project, the fellows have published several articles and have made presentations in venues ranging from departmental meetings to international conferences -- all based on their experiences. And on the Indiana University Bloomington campus and in multiple high schools across the state, veterans of the program have spontaneously created local faculty learning communities in which they are sharing the Decoding process and conducting Decoding interviews with their colleagues.

== More information about the Program ==
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T22:16:36Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://youtu.be/uTBQkycMc3g Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe the Decoding process and describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (Thanks to FALCON and FACET for their assistance in making these videos available.)
** [https://youtu.be/U95d1roBXyk Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course]
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]
** [https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2358907/pages/decoding-across-the-high-school-slash-college-frontier-to-understand-our-students-experience The entire FALCON presentation] (including a general description of Decoding including the sections on biology and chemistry linked above.)

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

==== More information about the Program ====
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T22:04:50Z

Dpace: Added Link

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe the Decoding process and describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (Thanks to FALCON and FACET for their assistance in making these videos available.)
** [https://youtu.be/U95d1roBXyk Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biology course]
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]
** [https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2358907/pages/decoding-across-the-high-school-slash-college-frontier-to-understand-our-students-experience The entire FALCON presentation] (including a general description of Decoding including the sections on biology and chemistry linked above.)

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

==== More information about the Program ====
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T21:55:56Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* Excerpts on the application of Decodindg in a biologycourse -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe the Decoding process and describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.
** Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a biologycourse
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Excerpts on the application of Decoding in a chemistry course]
** The entire FALCON presentation (including a general description of Decoding including the sections on biology and chemistry linked above.)

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

==== More information about the Program ====
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T21:43:40Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decoding.webflow.io/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and college teachers threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit students' success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows from both levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much better notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups stressed the importance of participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "[https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2358907/pages/decoding-across-the-high-school-slash-college-frontier-to-understand-our-students-experience Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience]" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the high school/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/wiki/Decoding_Interview:_Helping_Students_Use_Graphs_in_a_Biology_Course Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

==== More information about the Program ====
A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T21:38:29Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "[https://iu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/t/1_8rpphomm Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience]" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry. (In addition to the video of the full session, below are the sections of the the presentation in which two of the Decoding Transitions Fellows provided details about how their experience in the program led to specific changes in their teaching strategies
** [https://youtu.be/uaGhfFF3i2A Biology]
**

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [[Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course]]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

== For More Information ==
A fuller description of this program maybe found in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The initial pilot for the Decoding Transitions to College Project was directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace with financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas played a very important role in the development of the project, as did the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T19:32:04Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "[https://iu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/t/1_8rpphomm Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience]" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [[Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course]]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

== For More Information ==
A fuller description of this program maybe found in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The initial pilot for the Decoding Transitions to College Project was directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace with financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas played a very important role in the development of the project, as did the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T19:28:34Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [[Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course]]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

== For More Information ==
A fuller description of this program maybe found in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The initial pilot for the Decoding Transitions to College Project was directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace with financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas played a very important role in the development of the project, as did the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T19:27:20Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [[Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course]]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

==== For More Information ====
A fuller description of this program maybe found in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The initial pilot for the Decoding Transitions to College Project was directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace with financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas played a very important role in the development of the project, as did the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-14T19:22:06Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** [[Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course]]

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.

[[File:Notes from a Decoding Interview.jpg|thumb|Notes from a Decoding Interview]]

[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

2025-10-14T19:18:51Z

Dpace: Corrected link

Below you will find a link to excerpts from an interview with the teacher of an introductory college biology course that was conducted as part of the 2022 [[Decoding Transitions to College|Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project]]. With the help of high school and college teachers in both biology and Spanish, she works to understand why so many students have such difficulty comparing different graphs and to make explicit what they must learn to do to success at this task.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgo-G2nQqTU Link to the interview].
[[Category:Decoding Transitions to College]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Graphics]]

Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

2025-10-13T15:39:41Z

Dpace: Changed categories.

Below you will find a link to excerpts from an interview with the teacher of an introductory college biology course that was conducted as part of the 2022 [file://Decoding%20Transitions%20to%20College Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project]. With the help of high school and college teachers in both biology and Spanish, she works to understand why so many students have such difficulty comparing different graphs and to make explicit what they must learn to do to success at this task.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgo-G2nQqTU Link to the interview].
[[Category:Decoding Transitions to College]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Graphics]]

Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

2025-10-13T15:37:45Z

Dpace:

Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

2025-10-13T15:35:22Z

Dpace:

Below you will find a link to excerpts from an interview with the teacher of an introductory college biology course that was conducted as part of the 2022 [[:File:Decoding Transitions to College|Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project]]. With the help of high school and college teachers in both biology and Spanish, she works to understand why so many students have such difficulty comparing different graphs and to make explicit what they must learn to do to success at this task.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgo-G2nQqTU Link to the interview].

Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

2025-10-13T15:33:25Z

Dpace: Added Link

Below you will find a link to excerpts from an interview with the teacher of an introductory college biology course that was conducted as part of the 2022 [[Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project]]. With the help of high school and college teachers in both biology and Spanish, she works to understand why so many students have such difficulty comparing different graphs and to make explicit what they must learn to do to success at this task.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgo-G2nQqTU Link to the interview].

Decoding Interview: Helping Students Use Graphs in a Biology Course

2025-10-13T15:25:54Z

Dpace: Added Link

Below you will find a link to excerpts from an interview with the teacher of an introductory college biology course that was conducted as part of the 2022 Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project. With the help of high school and college teachers in both biology and Spanish, she works to understand why so many students have such difficulty comparing different graphs and to make explicit what they must learn to do to success at this task.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgo-G2nQqTU Link to the interview].

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-13T15:10:12Z

Dpace: Image added

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
[[File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg|thumb]]
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.

[[File:Notes from a Decoding Interview.jpg|thumb|Notes from a Decoding Interview]]

[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

File:Notes from a Decoding Interview.jpg

2025-10-13T15:09:20Z

Dpace:

Notes from a Decoding Interview

File:Interview Notes Large.jpg

2025-10-13T15:07:46Z

Dpace:

Interview Notes Large

File:Whiteboard with notes from a Decoding Interview.jpg

2025-10-13T15:03:37Z

Dpace:

Whiteboard with notes from a Decoding Interview

File:White board with material from a Decoding interview.jpg

2025-10-13T15:01:15Z

Dpace:

White board with material from a Decoding interview

File:Image of Fellows 2022.jpg

2025-10-13T14:58:16Z

Dpace:

Fellows in program sharing ideas

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-13T14:54:19Z

Dpace: Adding Links

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a July 20215 program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
* "Decoding Across the High School/College Frontier to Understand Our Students’ Experience" -- A September 2025 panel in the 30th Annual FALCON Conference in which three fellows in the Decoding Transitions to College describe how they used what they learned in the program to make changes in key introductory college courses in biology and chemistry.

==== Evidence from the Interviews ====
The Decoding interviews, which served as the centerpiece of the program provided clear indications of impact of the program. The transcripts and videos of these interactions show the intense intellectual engagement of the fellows with the challenge of making explicit all the steps that students must master to get past common bottlenecks to student learning in their discipline. They also provide a window into the collaborative interaction of the fellows across disciplines and across the highschool/college frontier.

* Here are excerpts from the video of an interview with a fellow in the program that explores what students must be able to do to effective compare graphs in an introductory college biology course.
** Comparing Graphs in a College Biology Course

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-13T14:22:47Z

Dpace: Adding new material on the program

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational strata. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted Decoding interviews.

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows turned the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

== Outcomes ==
Both the high school and colleges threw themselves into the Decoding process with great enthusiasm. The teachers on both levels reported that they gained a new understanding of the broader arc of learning that their students experience and that this is offering them new possibilities for reaching more students. They identified common bottlenecks to learning that limit student success on both sides of the high school/college frontier, and they provided abundant testimony that the experience of the Decoding interviews provided them with new insights into the challenges that their students were facing. In fact, many of the fellows volunteered that the experience had not only helped them develop new ways to help students get past specific bottlenecks, but had fundamentally transformed their understanding of teaching and learning.

The impact of the Decoding Transitions to College Project was not limited to the teachers who directly participated in the summer workshops. Fellows fromboth levels spontaneously formed learning communities in their institutions that introduced other teachers to the Decoding process and conducted interviews on their own. They continue to share their work at state, national, and international meetings and through publications. And the concrete products of the program -- the identification of crucial bottlenecks to learning, transcripts and videos of the interviews, lesson plans used to model steps revealed in these interaction, evidence of the impact of these interventions, and materials used to share Decoding with colleagues in various contexts -- all of these will be made available to teachers around the world through this Wiki.

The success of this pilot went well beyond the expectations of its directors, and there is every reason to believe that this model can have the same impact on teachers and teaching in other contexts.

== Evidence of Success ==

==== Testimony from Participants ====
When asked about the impact of the program at a follow-up meeting, fellows from the program provided enthusiastic descriptions of how participation in the program had transformed their teaching. The high school teachers said that the encounter with university faculty had provided them with a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to prepare their students for college, and the Indiana University teachers indicated that they had a much clearer notion of what their students had been exposed to before they arrived on campus. Both groups also indicated the participating in the Decoding interviews with teachers both in and outside their disciplines.
But it was also clear that the program had also had a deeper and more pervasive effect on many of the teachers. A college biology teacher said that ”Decoding has really transformed my teaching in a way that I didn't expect. Now it's like you see bottlenecks everywhere. You can't stop seeing it.” A high school chemistry teacher said that he now thinks “more about what I haven’t told the kids.” And an English professor reported “that “being in the workshop holistically changed my approach .. [I am] making things more transparent.”

The teachers' descriptions of the impact of the program may be experienced directly in two videos that can be accessed below:

* "[https://fh-aachen.sciebo.de/s/9tAFF6Bnh74XcUO?dir=undefined&openfile=583712682 Decoding Beyond the University]" -- a program in the international Decoding the Disciplines webinar series in which four high school teachers describe how the program transformed their teaching in a panel discussion moderated by one of the college fellows. (Thanks to Miriam Barnat of the University of Applied Sciences in Aachen for making this presentation possible)
*

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-10-13T12:44:54Z

Dpace: Text rewritten -- image added

File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg

2025-10-13T12:28:05Z

Dpace:

Photo of discussion among participants in the Decoding Transitions to College Project

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-09-19T13:32:18Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the disjunction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program, the Decoding Transitions to College Project, that has been exploring new ways to bring groups of high school and college teachers together using the Decoding framework. Teachers from the two levels of the educational system conducted Decoding interviews with each other to explore bottlenecks to learning in their disciplines that were apt to block students’ progress from one level to the next. In addition to developing new strategies for helping students make a smooth transition to college, the high school teachers got a better understanding of the college courses that they were preparing students for and the college teachers learned more about the kinds of preparation their students had received before arriving in college.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier]” in Miriam Barnat, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Peter Riegler, eds., ''Revisiting disciplinary learning: New Developments in Decoding the Disciplines'' (Special issue of ''Die Hochschullehre'' (2025).

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-09-19T13:31:43Z

Dpace: Added Link

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the disjunction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program, the Decoding Transitions to College Project, that has been exploring new ways to bring groups of high school and college teachers together using the Decoding framework. Teachers from the two levels of the educational system conducted Decoding interviews with each other to explore bottlenecks to learning in their disciplines that were apt to block students’ progress from one level to the next. In addition to developing new strategies for helping students make a smooth transition to college, the high school teachers got a better understanding of the college courses that they were preparing students for and the college teachers learned more about the kinds of preparation their students had received before arriving in college.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “[https://die-hochschullehre.de/articles/312/files/6836c4683b7d1.pdf Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier].” in

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Template:PublishedWork

2025-06-08T20:38:56Z

Dpace: Changed categories.

{{Hint|text= '''How to use this template'''
# Start by inserting '''Bibliographic data''' in the corresponding Section below. Using APA-style is preferred. Most important, however, is that the data is correct and allows to locate the publication.
# If the publication is available for download on the internet insert the corresponding link in the Section '''External reference'''.
# Add abstract if available# When done editing, save page.
# When in reading mode, add suitable tags/categories by pressing the tag symbol on the bottom of the page. The following types of tags are needed:
#* The tag [[:Category:PublishedWork|PublishedWork]] which will be used automatically if you use this template.
#* A tag referring to the [[:Category:PublicationType|PublicationType]] such as e.g. [[:Category:Article|Article]], [[:Category:Book|Book]], or [[:Category:Poster|Poster]]. See [[:Category:PublishedWork]] for a full list of currently available tags.
#* Tags to the academic discipline the publication is related to like Linguistics or Physics. If the published work is not related to a specific discipline, use the tag [[:Category:General|General]].
#* One tag for each author's name (in the form <code>Lastname, Initial1 Initial2</code>; please put initials without finals dots, i.e. <code>Doe, J</code> rather than <code>Doe, J.</code>)
#* A tag referring to the year of publication as a four digit number, e.g. <code>2025</code>.
# Edit once again and delete the whole Box '''How to use this Template''' and save your changes.
}}

== Abstract ==

== Bibliographic data ==

== External source ==

[[Category:PublishedWork]]
[[Category:Article]]
[[Category:Pace, D]]
[[Category:2025]]
[[Category:High School]]

Template:Bottleneck

2025-06-02T23:11:45Z

Dpace: Fixed spelling

{{Hint|text= '''How to use this template'''
# Start by describing the bottleneck in the Section '''Description of Bottleneck'''. If you like you can orient yourself on the bottleneck description [[From Derivative to Proportionality]]. If you feel able to turn the bottleneck into a (positive) learning outcome, please do also describe the intended learning outcome.
# This wiki also serves to connect people interested in certain bottlenecks. If you wish to make yourself known as interested, fill in your name under '''People interested in this Bottleneck'''.
# When done editing, save page.
# When in reading mode, add suitable tags/categories by pressing the tag symbol on the top of the page. For instance, if the bottleneck is in connection to biology, add "biology" as a tag.
# Edit once again and delete the whole Section '''How to use this Template''' and save your changes.
}}

==Description of bottleneck==
Add description. Please, avoid [[Step_1_-_Identify_a_Bottleneck_to_Learning#Describing bottlenecks|vague descriptions]].

==Related scholarly work on this bottleneck==

==People interested in this bottleneck==

==References==

[[Category:Bottleneck]]

Pages needed

2025-05-28T18:05:15Z

Dpace:

{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Topic
!People willing to contribute
!Details
!Status
|-
|[[Limits]]
|[[User:Riegler|Peter Riegler]]
|uploading parts 4 and 5 of interview
|
|-
|<s>Language comprehension</s>
|[[User:Riegler|<s>Peter Riegler</s>]]
|<s>Summarizing the decoding work descriped in [[Lost in Language Comprehension: Decoding putatively extra-disciplinary expertise]]</s>
|done -> [[Textual descriptions in mathematics]]
|-
|[[The Decoding Clock Reading Activity|<s>The Decoding Clock Reading Activity</s>]]
|[[User:Riegler|<s>Peter Riegler</s>]]
|<s>describe mental tasks</s>
|done -> [[Reading a clock]]
|-
|Transition to College project
|David Pace
|describe the project, results etc.
|done
|-
|Alternative Decoding techniques
|Joan Middendorf
|analogies, bottleneck writing tour, 3-d modeling, rubrics, game mechanics, etc
|done
|-
|[[Bottleneck]]
|
|describe flavors of bottlenecks (such as cognitive, emotional)
|Examples introduced for cognitive and emotional bottlenecks (Inna)
|-
|[[Threshold concept]]
|David Pace or Joan Middendorf
|describe relationship to bottlenecks and Decoding
|Added section comparing Decoding to TCs
|-
|Transformative Dialogues
|
|describe role of journal, link to journal, etc.
|
|-
|Graph reading
|
|Sort of a review article summarizing research work on this topic
|
|-
|Reading scholarly work
|
|Sort of a review article summarizing research work on this topic
|
|-
|[[Faculty development]]
|[[Peter Riegler]] (appreciating a helpful hand in particular when it comes to FLP etc.) -- I can help on this.
|describe how Decoding is used for faculty development; give some history (e.g. FLP); link to relevant Decoding literature
|started
|-
|[[AI Literacy as a bottle neck]]
|
|As an aspect of digital literacy and being critical users of digital tools, it is important to address AI literacy as an bottleneck for social science students
|
|-
|More development of Disrupting page
|Michelle Yeo
|More information and references could be added to the current Disrupting page
|
|-
|[[New to Decoding?]]
|David Pace
|
|
|-
|[[Materials to introduce Decoding]]
|Peter Riegler
|page where people can share their intro materials to Decoding
- synopsis page linking to materials(e.g. ppt by high school teachers)
- section on how to add material
|
|}
See also [[Special:WantedPages]] for further pages needed.

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-05-28T16:02:58Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the disjunction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program, the Decoding Transitions to College Project, that has been exploring new ways to bring groups of high school and college teachers together using the Decoding framework. Teachers from the two levels of the educational system conducted Decoding interviews with each other to explore bottlenecks to learning in their disciplines that were apt to block students’ progress from one level to the next. In addition to developing new strategies for helping students make a smooth transition to college, the high school teachers got a better understanding of the college courses that they were preparing students for and the college teachers learned more about the kinds of preparation their students had received before arriving in college.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004). ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier.”

The program is directed by Rebecca Itow and David Pace and has received financial support from Indiana University. Michael Beam, William Robison, and Jahlea Douglas have played an important role in the development of the project, as have the Decoding Transitions to College Fellows, who have brought great energy to this effort.
[[Category:High School]]
[[Category:K-12 education]]

Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking

2025-05-28T15:40:45Z

Dpace:

{{Hint|text= '''How to use this template'''
# Start by inserting '''Bibliographic data''' in the corresponding Section below. Using APA-style is preferred. Most important, however, is that the data is correct and allows to locate the publication.
# If the publication is available for download on the internet insert the corresponding link in the Section '''External reference'''.
# Add abstract if available# When done editing, save page.
# When in reading mode, add suitable tags/categories by pressing the tag symbol on the top of the page. The following types of tags are needed:
#* The tag [[:Category:PublishedWork|PublishedWork]] which will be used automatically if you use this template.
#* A tag referring to the [[:Category:PublicationType|PublicationType]] such as e.g. [[:Category:Article|Article]], [[:Category:Book|Book]], or [[:Category:Poster|Poster]]. See [[:Category:PublishedWork]] for a full list of currently available tags.
#* Tags to the academic discipline the publication is related to like Linguistics or Physics. If the published work is not related to a specific discipline, use the tag [[:Category:General|General]].
#* One tag for each author's name (in the form <code>Lastname, Initial1 Initial2</code>; please put initials without finals dots, i.e. <code>Doe, J</code> rather than <code>Doe, J.</code>)
#* A tag referring to the year of publication as a four digit number, e.g. <code>2025</code>.
# Edit once again and delete the whole Box '''How to use this Template''' and save your changes.
}}

==Abstract==
This volume represents the first major debut of the Decoding the Disciplines model to the broader world of the scholarship of teaching and learning. It includes general articles on Decoding as well as application of the process in history, biology, astronomy, literature, business, and statistics. It was the result of work done by the directors and the fellows of the Indiana University

==Bibliographic data==

David Pace and Joan Middendorf, eds., ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'' (''New Directions for Teaching and Learning'', Vol. 98 (Fall 2004)
==External source==
==External source==

[[Category:PublishedWork]]
[[Category:Article]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Pace, D]]
[[Category:2004]]

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-05-28T15:33:55Z

Dpace:

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the disjunction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program, the Decoding Transitions to College Project, that has been exploring new ways to bring groups of high school and college teachers together using the Decoding framework. Teachers from the two levels of the educational system conducted Decoding interviews with each other to explore bottlenecks to learning in their disciplines that were apt to block students’ progress from one level to the next. In addition to developing new strategies for helping students make a smooth transition to college, the high school teachers got a better understanding of the college courses that they were preparing students for and the college teachers learned more about the kinds of preparation their students had received before arriving in college.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (P[[Ace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking|ace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004).''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'']]) in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier.”

Decoding Transitions to College

2025-05-28T15:20:05Z

Dpace: Created Page

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the disjunction between high school and college education. There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program, the Decoding Transitions to College Project, that has been exploring new ways to bring groups of high school and college teachers together using the Decoding framework. Teachers from the two levels of the educational system conducted Decoding interviews with each other to explore bottlenecks to learning in their disciplines that were apt to block students’ progress from one level to the next. In addition to developing new strategies for helping students make a smooth transition to college, the high school teachers got a better understanding of the college courses that they were preparing students for and the college teachers learned more about the kinds of preparation their students had received before arriving in college.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004). ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' )for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also actively engaged in spreading these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program is in Rebecca C. Itow, David Pace, Tara Darcy, Derek Chastain, Jahlea Douglas, William Robison, and Michael Beam, “Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier.”

Pages needed

2025-04-24T16:50:02Z

Dpace:

{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Topic
!People willing to contribute
!Details
!Status
|-
|[[Limits]]
|[[User:Riegler|Peter Riegler]]
|uploading parts 4 and 5 of interview
|
|-
|<s>Language comprehension</s>
|[[User:Riegler|<s>Peter Riegler</s>]]
|<s>Summarizing the decoding work descriped in [[Lost in Language Comprehension: Decoding putatively extra-disciplinary expertise]]</s>
|done -> [[Textual descriptions in mathematics]]
|-
|[[The Decoding Clock Reading Activity|<s>The Decoding Clock Reading Activity</s>]]
|[[User:Riegler|<s>Peter Riegler</s>]]
|<s>describe mental tasks</s>
|done -> [[Reading a clock]]
|-
|Transition to College project
|David Pace
|describe the project, results etc.
|
|-
|Trading analogies
|
|
|
|-
|[[Bottleneck]]
|
|describe flavors of bottlenecks
|
|-
|[[Threshold concept]]
|David Pace
|describe relationship to bottlenecks and Decoding
|
|-
|Transformative Dialogues
|
|describe role of journal, link to journal, etc.
|
|-
|Graph reading
|
|Sort of a review article summarizing research work on this topic
|
|-
|Reading scholarly work
|
|Sort of a review article summarizing research work on this topic
|
|-
|[[Faculty development]]
|[[Peter Riegler]] (appreciating a helpful hand in particular when it comes to FLP etc.) -- I can help on this.
|describe how Decoding is used for faculty development; give some history (e.g. FLP); link to relevant Decoding literature
|started
|-
|[[AI Literacy as a bottle neck]]
|
|As an aspect of digital literacy and being critical users of digital tools, it is important to address AI literacy as an bottleneck for social science students
|
|-
|More development of Disrupting page
|Michelle Yeo
|More information and references could be added to the current Disrupting page
|
|}
See also [[Special:WantedPages]] for further pages needed.

Pages needed

2025-04-24T16:35:30Z

Dpace: Added Names

{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Topic
!People willing to contribute
!Details
!Status
|-
|[[Limits]]
|[[User:Riegler|Peter Riegler]]
|uploading parts 4 and 5 of interview
|
|-
|<s>Language comprehension</s>
|[[User:Riegler|<s>Peter Riegler</s>]]
|<s>Summarizing the decoding work descriped in [[Lost in Language Comprehension: Decoding putatively extra-disciplinary expertise]]</s>
|done -> [[Textual descriptions in mathematics]]
|-
|[[The Decoding Clock Reading Activity|<s>The Decoding Clock Reading Activity</s>]]
|[[User:Riegler|<s>Peter Riegler</s>]]
|<s>describe mental tasks</s>
|done -> [[Reading a clock]]
|-
|Transition to College project
|
|describe the project, results etc.
|
|-
|Trading analogies
|
|
|
|-
|[[Bottleneck]]
|
|describe flavors of bottlenecks
|
|-
|[[Threshold concept]]
|David Pace
|describe relationship to bottlenecks and Decoding
|
|-
|Transformative Dialogues
|
|describe role of journal, link to journal, etc.
|
|-
|Graph reading
|
|Sort of a review article summarizing research work on this topic
|
|-
|Reading scholarly work
|
|Sort of a review article summarizing research work on this topic
|
|-
|[[Faculty development]]
|[[Peter Riegler]] (appreciating a helpful hand in particular when it comes to FLP etc.)
|describe how Decoding is used for faculty development; give some history (e.g. FLP); link to relevant Decoding literature
|started
|-
|[[AI Literacy as a bottle neck]]
|
|As an aspect of digital literacy and being critical users of digital tools, it is important to address AI literacy as an bottleneck for social science students
|
|-
|More development of Disrupting page
|Michelle Yeo
|More information and references could be added to the current Disrupting page
|
|}
See also [[Special:WantedPages]] for further pages needed.

Template:PublishedWork

2025-03-07T16:51:10Z

Dpace: Reference to icon at top changed to icon at bottom

Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking

2025-03-07T16:46:24Z

Dpace: Changed categories.

{{Hint|text= '''How to use this template'''
# Start by inserting '''Bibliographic data''' in the corresponding Section below. Using APA-style is preferred. Most important, however, is that the data is correct and allows to locate the publication.
# If the publication is available for download on the internet insert the corresponding link in the Section '''External reference'''.
# Add abstract if available# When done editing, save page.
# When in reading mode, add suitable tags/categories by pressing the tag symbol on the top of the page. The following types of tags are needed:
#* The tag [[:Category:PublishedWork|PublishedWork]] which will be used automatically if you use this template.
#* A tag referring to the [[:Category:PublicationType|PublicationType]] such as e.g. [[:Category:Article|Article]], [[:Category:Book|Book]], or [[:Category:Poster|Poster]]. See [[:Category:PublishedWork]] for a full list of currently available tags.
#* Tags to the academic discipline the publication is related to like Linguistics or Physics. If the published work is not related to a specific discipline, use the tag [[:Category:General|General]].
#* One tag for each author's name (in the form <code>Lastname, Initial1 Initial2</code>; please put initials without finals dots, i.e. <code>Doe, J</code> rather than <code>Doe, J.</code>)
#* A tag referring to the year of publication as a four digit number, e.g. <code>2025</code>.
# Edit once again and delete the whole Box '''How to use this Template''' and save your changes.
}}

==Abstract==

==Bibliographic data==
“Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking,” pp.1-12.

==External source==

[[Category:PublishedWork]]
[[Category:Article]]
[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Pace, D]]
[[Category:2004]]

Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking

2025-03-07T16:43:08Z

Dpace: Added title

{{Hint|text= '''How to use this template'''
# Start by inserting '''Bibliographic data''' in the corresponding Section below. Using APA-style is preferred. Most important, however, is that the data is correct and allows to locate the publication.
# If the publication is available for download on the internet insert the corresponding link in the Section '''External reference'''.
# Add abstract if available# When done editing, save page.
# When in reading mode, add suitable tags/categories by pressing the tag symbol on the top of the page. The following types of tags are needed:
#* The tag [[:Category:PublishedWork|PublishedWork]] which will be used automatically if you use this template.
#* A tag referring to the [[:Category:PublicationType|PublicationType]] such as e.g. [[:Category:Article|Article]], [[:Category:Book|Book]], or [[:Category:Poster|Poster]]. See [[:Category:PublishedWork]] for a full list of currently available tags.
#* Tags to the academic discipline the publication is related to like Linguistics or Physics. If the published work is not related to a specific discipline, use the tag [[:Category:General|General]].
#* One tag for each author's name (in the form <code>Lastname, Initial1 Initial2</code>; please put initials without finals dots, i.e. <code>Doe, J</code> rather than <code>Doe, J.</code>)
#* A tag referring to the year of publication as a four digit number, e.g. <code>2025</code>.
# Edit once again and delete the whole Box '''How to use this Template''' and save your changes.
}}

==Abstract==

==Bibliographic data==
“Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking,” pp.1-12.

==External source==

[[Category:PublishedWork]]

Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking

2025-03-07T16:39:47Z

Dpace: Nothing

{{Hint|text= '''How to use this template'''
# Start by inserting '''Bibliographic data''' in the corresponding Section below. Using APA-style is preferred. Most important, however, is that the data is correct and allows to locate the publication.
# If the publication is available for download on the internet insert the corresponding link in the Section '''External reference'''.
# Add abstract if available# When done editing, save page.
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==Abstract==

==Bibliographic data==

==External source==

[[Category:PublishedWork]]

An example of Holistic Decoding in a History Course

2025-03-07T16:24:21Z

Dpace:

(This page was originally designed to accompany an article that is being considered for publication (" Focused and Holistic Decoding: Two Ways to Embody Modeling, Practice, and Assessment"), but this material may be, of interest to a wide-range of those working within Decoding.

The material below was drawn from an upper level [[:Category:History|history]] course and was designed to help students work through a series of connected [[Bottleneck|bottlenecks]], all of which can prevent a student from successfully writing a history paper.

== Bottlenecks ==
Here are the bottlenecks that are being worked on. In writing a history paper students frequently have difficulty:

* Understanding that history is about presenting interpretations and supporting them with evidence
* Understand what needs to be demonstrated to support a particular interpretation
* [[Reading Selectively in History|Reading selectively]] looking for relevant evidence to support a particular interpretation
* Explaining to a reader how the evidence supports this interpretation

== Holistic Decoding ==
In developing strategies for modeling, providing practice and feedback, and assessing student progress in reference to these four bottlenecks, I deviated from the common practice of using Decoding as an intervention in an existing course in order to help more students get past specific obstacles before returning to the course as it was previously constituted -- a process I have characterized as "Focused Decoding." Instead, in the course under consideration I made the overcoming of these bottlenecks a central focus of the course itself, privileging [[Step 3 - Modeling Mental Operations|modeling]], [[Step 4: Give Students Practice and Feedback|practice]], [[Step 6 - Assess Student Mastery|assessment]] over sharing content and disciplinary concepts. I also treated modeling, practice, and assessment, not as steps in a sequential process, but rather as functions several of which could be actualized in a single activity. Thus, a particular online assignment, an in-class team exercise, or a background lecture might be designed so that they fulfilled one, two, or even all three of these functions.

The goal of this approach, which I have called "Holistic Decoding," is to embed the students in a learning environment in which call of the elements work together to reinforce what students need to learn to do to get past the bottlenecks listed above.

== Activities ==
Below is a list of the activities I used in the first two weeks of the course to create an environment in which appropriate elements of building a history paper was modeled, practiced, and assessed in an organic fashion. When appropriate, I have added links to course materials that were actually used in the process and indicated which of three Decoding functions was being addressed. But the real impact lies less in any single activity, but rather in the cumulative impact of them in creating an organic learning experience.

* Week 1 mini lecture: Goal = reading selectively and dealing with material that is unfamiliar.
** I read a passage from the main reading assignment for the week and systematically demonstrated how I would isolate the elements that were relevant to this course (Modeling) --
**
* Week 1 online modeling presentation: Goal = reading selectively and dealing with material that is unfamiliar.
** On the course website students were presented with a different passage from the readings and given pointers on how to identify material that was relevant to their work for the week. (Modeling) [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/w/index.php?title=Reading_Banquet_Years_1&preload=&redlink=1 Reading ''The Banquet Years'' -- 1]
* Week 1 & 2: Goal = 1) helping students to recognize that history is about presenting and offering evidence to support interpretations; 2) showing students how to connect interpretations with specific evidence
** Mini lectures were presented in the form of competing interpretations of the issues at hand, and relevant background information was introduced as evidence supporting one interpretation or another. (Modeling and Practice) [[Modeling the Writing of a History Paper]]
* The second week’s online assignment presented students with two interpretations of the relationship between Avant Garde culture and bourgeois capitalist society. The students chose one of these, selected four bits of relevant evidence, and then explained how this example made the interpretation that they had chosen more credible. (The structure of the assignment required them to find evidence in two different sections of the assigned readings, on the course website, and from one of the lectures — thus, also also modeling the integration of multiple sources, and an incentive to do the readings and follow the lectures.) ([[An Online Assignment on Writing a History Paper|Week 2 Assignment]])
* Week 2 Team Exercise #2 Students viewed [[wikipedia:René_Clair|René Clair]]’s short film, Entr’acte and then considered how individual elements in the film might provide support for an interpretation of modernism that they had encountered in the readings. ([[:File:Wk2B Team Exercise EntrActe.pdf|Wk2B Team Exercise]])
* In between these activities there were whole-class discussions in which teams reported out and the basic pattern of focusing on evidence and interpretations was reinforced once again.

== See also ==

* Decoding work on [[:Category:History|history]]
*

[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Modeling]]
[[Category:Practice]]
[[Category:Assessment]]

An example of Holistic Decoding in a History Course

2025-03-07T15:40:39Z

Dpace:

(This page was originally designed to accompany an article that is being considered for publication (" Focused and Holistic Decoding: Two Ways to Embody Modeling, Practice, and Assessment"), but this material may be, of interest to a wide-range of those working within Decoding.

The material below was drawn from an upper level [[:Category:History|history]] course and was designed to help students work through a series of connected [[Bottleneck|bottlenecks]], all of which can prevent a student from successfully writing a history paper.

== Bottlenecks ==
Here are the bottlenecks that are being worked on. In writing a history paper students frequently have difficulty:

* Understanding that history is about presenting interpretations and supporting them with evidence
* Understand what needs to be demonstrated to support a particular interpretation
* [[Reading Selectively in History|Reading selectively]] looking for relevant evidence to support a particular interpretation
* Explaining to a reader how the evidence supports this interpretation

== Holistic Decoding ==
In developing strategies for modeling, providing practice and feedback, and assessing student progress in reference to these four bottlenecks, I deviated from the common practice of using Decoding as an intervention in an existing course in order to help more students get past specific obstacles before returning to the course as it was previously constituted -- a process I have characterized as "Focused Decoding." Instead, in the course under consideration I made the overcoming of these bottlenecks a central focus of the course itself, privileging [[Step 3 - Modeling Mental Operations|modeling]], [[Step 4: Give Students Practice and Feedback|practice]], [[Step 6 - Assess Student Mastery|assessment]] over sharing content and disciplinary concepts. I also treated modeling, practice, and assessment, not as steps in a sequential process, but rather as functions several of which could be actualized in a single activity. Thus, a particular online assignment, an in-class team exercise, or a background lecture might be designed so that they fulfilled one, two, or even all three of these functions.

The goal of this approach, which I have called "Holistic Decoding," is to embed the students in a learning environment in which call of the elements work together to reinforce what students need to learn to do to get past the bottlenecks listed above.

== Activities ==
Below is a list of the activities I used in the first two weeks of the course to create an environment in which appropriate elements of building a history paper was modeled, practiced, and assessed in an organic fashion. When appropriate, I have added links to course materials that were actually used in the process and indicated which of three Decoding functions was being addressed. But the real impact lies less in any single activity, but rather in the cumulative impact of them in creating an organic learning experience.

* Week 1 mini lecture: Goal = reading selectively and dealing with material that is unfamiliar.
** I read a passage from the main reading assignment for the week and systematically demonstrated how I would isolate the elements that were relevant to this course (Modeling) --
**
* Week 1 online modeling presentation: Goal = reading selectively and dealing with material that is unfamiliar.
** On the course website students were presented with a different passage from the readings and given pointers on how to identify material that was relevant to their work for the week. (Modeling) [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/w/index.php?title=Reading_Banquet_Years_1&preload=&redlink=1 Reading ''The Banquet Years'' -- 1]
* Week 1 & 2: Goal = 1) helping students to recognize that history is about presenting and offering evidence to support interpretations; 2) showing students how to connect interpretations with specific evidence
** Mini lectures were presented in the form of competing interpretations of the issues at hand, and relevant background information was introduced as evidence supporting one interpretation or another. (Modeling and Practice) [[Modeling the Writing of a History Paper]]
* The second week’s online assignment presented students with two interpretations of the relationship between Avant Garde culture and bourgeois capitalist society. The students chose one of these, selected four bits of relevant evidence, and then explained how this example made the interpretation that they had chosen more credible. (The structure of the assignment required them to find evidence in two different sections of the assigned readings, on the course website, and from one of the lectures — thus, also also modeling the integration of multiple sources, and an incentive to do the readings and follow the lectures.) ([[An Online Assignment on Writing a History Paper|Week 2 Assignment]])
* Week 2 Team Exercise #2 Students viewed [[wikipedia:René_Clair|René Clair]]’s short film, Entr’acte and then considered how individual elements in the film might provide support for an interpretation of modernism that they had encountered in the readings. ([[Wk2B Team Exercise]])
* In between these activities there were whole-class discussions in which teams reported out and the basic pattern of focusing on evidence and interpretations was reinforced once again.

== See also ==

* Decoding work on [[:Category:History|history]]
*

[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Modeling]]
[[Category:Practice]]
[[Category:Assessment]]

An example of Holistic Decoding in a History Course

2025-03-07T15:38:44Z

Dpace: Added Link

(This page was originally designed to accompany an article that is being considered for publication (" Focused and Holistic Decoding: Two Ways to Embody Modeling, Practice, and Assessment"), but this material may be, of interest to a wide-range of those working within Decoding.

The material below was drawn from an upper level [[:Category:History|history]] course and was designed to help students work through a series of connected [[Bottleneck|bottlenecks]], all of which can prevent a student from successfully writing a history paper.

== Bottlenecks ==
Here are the bottlenecks that are being worked on. In writing a history paper students frequently have difficulty:

* Understanding that history is about presenting interpretations and supporting them with evidence
* Understand what needs to be demonstrated to support a particular interpretation
* [[Reading Selectively in History|Reading selectively]] looking for relevant evidence to support a particular interpretation
* Explaining to a reader how the evidence supports this interpretation

== Holistic Decoding ==
In developing strategies for modeling, providing practice and feedback, and assessing student progress in reference to these four bottlenecks, I deviated from the common practice of using Decoding as an intervention in an existing course in order to help more students get past specific obstacles before returning to the course as it was previously constituted -- a process I have characterized as "Focused Decoding." Instead, in the course under consideration I made the overcoming of these bottlenecks a central focus of the course itself, privileging [[Step 3 - Modeling Mental Operations|modeling]], [[Step 4: Give Students Practice and Feedback|practice]], [[Step 6 - Assess Student Mastery|assessment]] over sharing content and disciplinary concepts. I also treated modeling, practice, and assessment, not as steps in a sequential process, but rather as functions several of which could be actualized in a single activity. Thus, a particular online assignment, an in-class team exercise, or a background lecture might be designed so that they fulfilled one, two, or even all three of these functions.

The goal of this approach, which I have called "Holistic Decoding," is to embed the students in a learning environment in which call of the elements work together to reinforce what students need to learn to do to get past the bottlenecks listed above.

== Activities ==
Below is a list of the activities I used in the first two weeks of the course to create an environment in which appropriate elements of building a history paper was modeled, practiced, and assessed in an organic fashion. When appropriate, I have added links to course materials that were actually used in the process and indicated which of three Decoding functions was being addressed. But the real impact lies less in any single activity, but rather in the cumulative impact of them in creating an organic learning experience.

* Week 1 mini lecture: Goal = reading selectively and dealing with material that is unfamiliar.
** I read a passage from the main reading assignment for the week and systematically demonstrated how I would isolate the elements that were relevant to this course (Modeling) --
**
* Week 1 online modeling presentation: Goal = reading selectively and dealing with material that is unfamiliar.
** On the course website students were presented with a different passage from the readings and given pointers on how to identify material that was relevant to their work for the week. (Modeling) [http://www.decodingthedisciplines.de/w/index.php?title=Reading_Banquet_Years_1&preload=&redlink=1 Reading ''The Banquet Years'' -- 1]
* Week 1 & 2: Goal = 1) helping students to recognize that history is about presenting and offering evidence to support interpretations; 2) showing students how to connect interpretations with specific evidence
** Mini lectures were presented in the form of competing interpretations of the issues at hand, and relevant background information was introduced as evidence supporting one interpretation or another. (Modeling and Practice) [[Modeling the Writing of a History Paper]]
* The second week’s online assignment presented students with two interpretations of the relationship between Avant Garde culture and bourgeois capitalist society. The students chose one of these, selected four bits of relevant evidence, and then explained how this example made the interpretation that they had chosen more credible. (The structure of the assignment required them to find evidence in two different sections of the assigned readings, on the course website, and from one of the lectures — thus, also also modeling the integration of multiple sources, and an incentive to do the readings and follow the lectures.) ([[An Online Assignment on Writing a History Paper|Week 2 Assignment]])
* Week 2 Team Exercise #2 Students viewed [[wikipedia:René_Clair|René Clair]]’s short film, Entr’acte and then considered how individual elements in the film might provide support for an interpretation of modernism that they had encountered in the readings. ([[Wk2B Team Exercise]])
* In between these activities there were whole-class discussions in which teams reported out and the basic pattern of focusing on evidence and interpretations was reinforced once again.

== See also ==

* Decoding work on [[:Category:History|history]]

[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Modeling]]
[[Category:Practice]]
[[Category:Assessment]]

Team Exercise Offering Practice on Using Evidence in a History Course

2025-03-07T15:37:24Z

Dpace: Added material

In order to model and reinforce the process of using evidence in a history course, I have introduced numerous team excises in which students engaged in this activity. Here is an example that is part of the larger process described at [[An example of Holistic Decoding ina History Course]].
[[File:Wk2B Team Exercise EntrActe.pdf|thumb|A team exercise designed to model, give practice on, and assessment the use of evidence in a history course.]]

File:Wk2B Team Exercise EntrActe.pdf

2025-03-07T15:35:53Z

Dpace:

A team exercise designed to model and give practice on the use of evidence in a history course. [[Category:History]]
[[Category:Modeling]]
[[Category:Practice]]

Team Exercise Offering Practice on Using Evidence in a History Course

2025-03-07T15:34:02Z

Dpace: Added Link