In this chapter we describe the “Decoding the Disciplines” Faculty Learning Community
at Mount Royal University, and how Decoding has been used in new and
multidisciplinary ways in the various teaching, curriculum and research projects which
are presented in detail in subsequent chapters.
Overview of Decoding Across the Disciplines
Jennifer Boman, Genevieve Currie, Ron MacDonald, Janice Miller-Young, Michelle
Yeo, and Stephanie Zettel
The Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community (FLC) at Mount Royal
University consists of a core group of six faculty members who came together to further
understand and investigate how to make disciplinary ways of thinking and knowing more
explicit to learners. The group’s original goal was to interrogate the Decoding the
Disciplines model (Pace and Middendorf 2004) and to consider how this framework
might be used within our own contexts. The Decoding model suggests that teachers,
operating as experts in their disciplines, hold tacit knowledge and implicit ways of
thinking that are not accessible to novices in the discipline. Consequently, teachers and
students may notice bottlenecks—areas in the discipline where students get stuck in their
learning. A key step towards addressing the bottlenecks is a Decoding interview in which
teachers uncover and unpack crucial mental operations. The interview can yield
important insights for teachers who want to make their mental processes visible to
students in order to help facilitate students’ movement through the bottlenecks.
As a learning community, our group began conducting Decoding interviews with
one another and analyzing the resulting dialogues. We went beyond cognitive
bottlenecks, for which Decoding has typically been used, to include epistemological and

ontological bottlenecks (Miller-Young and Boman, this issue). In doing so, we explored
new lines of questioning and found rich themes about expert disciplinary thinking. These
themes illuminated the complexity of the expert teachers’ thinking and helped us
understand why the bottlenecks were so challenging for students. We wanted to share
these insights with colleagues at our institution and, thus, our work expanded over time to
include outreach to increase other faculty members’ awareness and use of the Decoding
model. We have also provided support for those using the Decoding process for purposes
such as curriculum revision and individual development of teaching. The following
overview provides a summary of the group’s work and sets the context for the articles to
follow.
The Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community
How does a group of interested faculty members come together for the common purpose
of increasing their understanding of how students learn disciplinary ways of thinking? In
this case, the group emerged organically out of a related faculty development initiative.
Each year the university’s teaching support centre offers a series of year long Faculty
Learning Communities (FLCs) on a variety of topics. In 2011-2012, a group of 8 faculty
members and a facilitator (a faculty developer working in the centre) came together to
explore and study theories and practices related to assessment. Part of our conversation
and reading included an in depth exploration of outcomes-based assessment (Driscoll and
Wood 2007). From these discussions, it became apparent to us that in order to make our
assessments more transparent to students, we needed to have a clearer picture of the
mental operations we expected students to learn. In other words, we needed to unpack the
complex skills and outcomes that we were attempting to assess so that we could make

them explicit and visible to students. We grappled with a key question: ‘How could we
uncover hidden assumptions and tacit thinking in our assessments?’
At the conclusion of the year long FLC on assessment, a core group of four
participants decided to continue the conversation about uncovering expert thinking in
assessment and teaching using the Decoding the Disciplines model. We invited two
additional, interested faculty members to join our group. We began our learning
community by reading the Decoding literature as well as other related sources (for
example, Making Thinking Visible, Ritchart, Church, and Morrison 2011). Several
members of our group also attended the International Society for the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) conference to participate in a Decoding workshop
(Middendorf, Pace, Shopkow, and Diaz 2012). Throughout these experiences, we were
struck by the power of the Decoding interview in revealing basic assumptions about
disciplinary thinking.
After the instructor has identified a bottleneck where students get stuck in their
learning, the next step in the Decoding process is an interview (Middendorf and Pace
2004). The primary task of the Decoding interview is to identify how the instructor
approaches the bottleneck by making explicit what is intuitive, hidden, or automatic for
her as an expert. This goal is typically accomplished using two interviewers who are not
familiar with the subject matter and can act as novices in the discipline. The central
question that they ask with respect to how the instructor addresses the bottleneck is,
“How do you do that?” (Middendorf and Rehrey 2008). Middendorf and Pace (2004)
describe this process for the interviewee as the “most intellectually demanding of all the
steps in the Decoding the Disciplines approach” (5). The interviewee may experience

discomfort as they realize that they cannot readily articulate their thinking and that
perhaps they have not provided clear explanations to students. In fact, this “aha” moment
or instance where the expert herself struggles to deconstruct her intellectual process is a
signal that the interview is on the right track (Middendorf and Rehrey 2008).
Our faculty learning community was intrigued by the role of the Decoding
interview in uncovering disciplinary mental operations that were hidden not only from
students but also from the expert himself. While there were general guidelines on the
types of questions that help prompt the interviewee to reconstruct how he approaches the
bottleneck (Middendorf and Rehrey 2008), the literature on the Decoding interviewing
process was scarce. We wanted to better understand how the interviews unfolded to
reveal expert disciplinary thinking. We decided that the best approach was to “learn by
doing” and made a plan to conduct Decoding interviews with one another and to record
and transcribe the interviews so that we could examine the resulting dialogues.
The Decoding Interviews
Our group conducted the first Decoding interview as a group; all members of the group
interviewed one of our group members. As this interview progressed, we quickly realized
the challenge of staying true to the purpose of the interview—that is talking about how
the expert accomplishes a particular bottleneck rather than talking about teaching. With
practice, we were able to more successfully direct the expert to talk about their own
thinking processes and leave the discussions about teaching and how to model these
operations for students for follow-up conversations. A second challenge that we
encountered as we moved further into our interviews with one another was not that all
interviewees presented a cognitive or procedural bottlenecks. Some presented

epistemological or ontological bottlenecks (Miller-Young and Boman, this issue) which,
for us, proved to be more difficult to deconstruct.
During the time that we were conducting interviews, we invited David Pace to
speak at our campus. The purposes of the visit were twofold. First, we asked him to
consult with us and give us feedback about our firsthand experiences conducting
Decoding interviews. Second, we invited him to give a keynote presentation and
workshops to introduce faculty members at our institution to the Decoding model.
Following his visit, we invited any interested participants to engage in a Decoding
interview with us as a faculty development initiative. We offered to conduct the interview
with them and to follow up with discussions about how to apply what they learned during
the interview to their teaching.
Our Decoding learning community continued to meet to discuss what we had
learned from engaging in the interviewing process. Despite interviewing participants
from different disciplines and who had different kinds of bottlenecks, we began to notice
similar themes appearing across several interviews. For example, one idea that we saw in
multiple interviews was the idea of withholding or waiting. A characteristic of expert
thinking that we observed was that experts held back and paused in their disciplinary
thinking. In contrast, the experts described their students as rushing ahead to judgment.
While we had learned much about the interviewing process from conducting our
interviews, we also realized we had rich dialogues that held a lot of learning about expert
disciplinary thinking. We obtained ethical approval to use our data for research and
contacted participants to seek permission to include their transcripts in the analysis.

We conducted an in depth qualitative analysis of interviews with seven
disciplinary experts from four diverse disciplines. Each instructor chose a unique
bottleneck that represented a cognitive, epistemological, or ontological block that their
students were encountering. The themes in expert disciplinary thinking arising from these
interviews are described in Chapter 2 (Miller-Young and Boman). Three subsequent
chapters also present further analyses of these interviews through three different lenses.
In Chapter 3, Currie uses phenomenology to interrogate the concept of embodiment in the
interviews. In Chapter 4, Yeo presents a hermeneutic analysis of the interviews to
describe how some interviewees expressed an understanding of their discipline. Finally,
in Chapter 5, MacDonald uses the lens of identity theory to discuss how the interviewees
inserted professional identity elements into their narratives.
Decoding in Practice: Applications of the Decoding Model
While the initial goal of our faculty learning community was to investigate how to make
our own tacit disciplinary knowledge more explicit to our students, our process expanded
over time to support others in the university community who were interested in using the
Decoding model. One such example is a multidisciplinary group of faculty teaching with
Community Service-Learning pedagogy. The group was about to engage in a
collaborative self-study of their experiences in teaching global service-learning courses
and were particularly interested in how this experience shaped their understanding and
learning about reciprocity. One of the members from our Decoding learning community
presented the Decoding framework to them and they subsequently elected to use the
Decoding interviews as one method of data collection in their self-study. The Decoding
faculty learning community assisted in the interviewing process. Their analysis found that

the Decoding interview played an important role in developing the community and trust
necessary for the study to generate new knowledge (Miller-Young et al., 2015); they
further explore their multidisciplinary self-study process and its impact on their practice
in Chapter 6.
The Decoding the Disciplines framework has also been used in several
departments across campus for the purposes of curriculum redesign. Faculty in the
Journalism program used it to inform program redesign and the results from Decoding
interviews also informed the redesign of a combined Biology and Nursing course. Most
recently, the Athletic Therapy program has used Decoding interviews about multiple
bottlenecks within a program to provide the Athletic Therapy instructors with
information to inform their curriculum change towards a competency-based model. Yeo
and colleagues describe their curriculum transformation process and the role of Decoding
interviews in Chapter 7.
Looking Forward
McKinney (2013, 3) called for “more resources that offer examples, applications and
discussions of critical issues of SoTL in disciplines beyond our own and in
interdisciplinary SoTL efforts. Such resources help broaden our horizons and encourage
cross-disciplinary collaborations by sharing conceptual frameworks, methodologies, key
results and practical applications that may be useful in our own classrooms and SoTL
research”. In the same collection, Poole (2013) argues that diverse methodologies and
theoretical perspectives should be used to study teaching and learning. In this special
issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning, we answer these calls by
demonstrating how the Decoding the Disciplines framework holds much potential for

bridging disciplinary thinking and teaching practice across disciplines. The following
chapters represent applications of the Decoding model in various scholarly and applied
contexts. In addition, in Chapter 8, we synthesize these findings and provide
recommendations for how the Decoding framework can be used in other contexts. We
hope that these examples will help readers to consider ways in which they might identify
and translate the crucial ways of thinking, practicing and being in their own disciplines in
order to improve student learning.
References
Currie, Genevieve. 201X. “Conscious Connections: Phenomenology and Decoding the
Disciplines.” In Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across
Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. xx, edited by Janice MillerYoung and Jennifer Boman, pp-pp. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Driscoll, Amy, and Swarup Wood. 2007. Developing Outcomes-based Assessment for
Learning-Centered Education: A Faculty Introduction. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
MacDonald, Ron. 201X. “Intuitions, Instincts, and Intercultural Crossings: Decoding
Disciplinary Identities.” In Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning
Across Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. xx, edited by Janice
Miller-Young and Jennifer Boman, pp-pp. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
McKinney, Kathleen. 2013. “Introduction to SoTL in and across the disciplines.” In The
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines, edited by Kathleen.
McKinney, 1-11. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Middendorf, Joan and David Pace. 2004. “Decoding the disciplines: A model for helping
students learn disciplinary ways of thinking.” In Decoding the Disciplines: Helping

Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking, New Directions for Teaching and
Learning, no. 98, edited by David Pace and Joan Middendorf, 1-12. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
Middendorf, Joan, David Pace, Leah Shopkow, and Arlene Diaz. “Decoding the
Disciplines: Getting Through Bottlenecks and Thresholds.” Workshop presented at The
International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Conference, Hamilton,
Ontario, Canada, October 2012.
Middendorf, Joan and George Rehrey. “Developing an Evidence-Based Curriculum and
Assessment: The History Learning Project.” Paper presented at the Professional and
Organizational Development Network Conference, Reno, NV, October 2008.
Miller-Young, Janice, Yasmin Dean, Melanie Rathburn, Jennifer Pettit, Margot
Underwood, Judy Gleeson, Roberta Lexier, Victoria Calvert, and Patti Clayton. 2015.
“Decoding Ourselves: An Inquiry into Faculty Learning About Reciprocity in ServiceLearning.” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 22 (1): 32-47.
Miller-Young, J., and Boman, J. 201X. "Uncovering Ways of Thinking, Practicing, and
Being through Decoding across Disciplines." In Using the Decoding the Disciplines
Framework for Learning Across Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning,
no. xx, edited by Janice Miller-Young and Jennifer Boman, pp-pp. San Francisco: JosseyBass.
Pace, David, and Joan Middendorf, eds. 2004. Decoding the Disciplines: Helping
Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking, New Directions for Teaching and
Learning, no. 98. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pettit, Jennifer, Melanie Rathburn, Victoria Calvert, Roberta Lexier, Margot Underwood,
Judy Gleeson, and Yasmin Dean. 201X. “Building Bridges from the Decoding Interview
to Teaching Practice.” In Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning
Across Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. xx, edited by Janice
Miller-Young and Jennifer Boman, pp-pp. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Poole, Gary. 2013. “Square one: What is research?” In The Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning In and Across the Disciplines, edited by K. McKinney, 135-151. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Ritchhart, Ron, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison. 2011. Making thinking visible: How
to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. John Wiley &
Sons.
Yeo, Michelle. 201X. “Decoding the Disciplines as a Hermeneutic Practice.” In Using
the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines, New
Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. xx, edited by Janice Miller-Young and
Jennifer Boman, pp-pp. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Yeo, Michelle, Mark Lafave, Khatija Westbrook, Jenelle McAllister, Dennis Valdez, and
Breda Eubank. 201X. “Impact of Decoding Work within a Professional Program.” In
Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines, New
Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. xx, edited by Janice Miller-Young and
Jennifer Boman, pp-pp. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

JENNIFER BOMAN has been a faculty developer and faculty member in Mount Royal
University’s Academic Development Centre since 2010.

GENEVIEVE CURRIE has been a faculty member at Mount Royal University since
2001 and teaches within the School of Nursing and Midwifery.

RON MACDONALD has been a college and university teacher of political science,
political philosophy and journalism for 35 years and is an Associate Professor at Mount
Royal University.

JANICE MILLER-YOUNG has been a faculty member at Mount Royal University since
2002 and the Director of the Institute for SoTL since 2013.

MICHELLE YEO has been a faculty developer and faculty member in Mount Royal
University’s Academic Development Centre since 2007.

STEPHANIE ZETTEL has been a full-time faculty member in Mount Royal University's
School of Nursing and Midwifery since 2009 and before that taught in the clinical
environment as part-time faculty since 2002.