MacMillan Margy (author); Yeo Michelle (author); Currie Genevieve (author); Pace David (author); McCollum Brett (author); Miller-Young Janice (author)
Date issued
2016
Description
Scholars of teaching and learning around the world and in many disciplines have been using the Decoding the Disciplines process to make explicit the mental operations that students must master to succeed. Teachers, as experts in their disciplines, often hold this knowledge in tacit and implicit ways that are not easily accessible to novices, resulting in "bottlenecks" to learning. A key step towards addressing bottlenecks is a Decoding interview in which teachers uncover and unpack crucial thinking with the help of two interviewers outside their field. The interview can yield important insights for teachers, generate data for SoTL work, and also play an important role in developing the...
Boman Jennifer (author); Currie Genevieve (author); MacDonald Ron (author); Miller-Young Janice (author); Yeo Michelle (author); Zettel Stephanie (author)
Date issued
2015
Description
Tuning in on teaching practice in any discipline may well run up against a problem of tacit knowledge--knowledge crucial to the discipline’s ways of thinking and practicing, but by nature obscure. Teachers who omit to make their tacit knowledge explicit in the classroom cause learning bottlenecks for their students. Tacit knowledge can be made explicit to its teacher owner, with positive effect on her teaching, in an interview that invites her to address how she thinks and practices in work her students, lacking her tacit knowledge, find impossible to master (Middendorf & Pace, 2004). We have conducted half a dozen such 90-minute to two-hour interviews with university teachers in...
This transcribed Decoding interview was part of a study conducted by the Decoding Faculty Learning Community at Mount Royal University. It is analyzed from multiple theoretical perspectives in an upcoming special issue of NDTL due for publication in 2017: Miller-Young, Janice, and Jennifer Boman, eds. (accepted.) Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
