Event Flyer

Presented By: Joan Middendorf, PhD, Indiana University Bloomington

A shift is taking place in higher education so that teaching is approached not only from content and from teaching methods, but also from the mental operations that are crucial to functioning in a discipline. Decoding the Disciplines (Pace and Middendorf, 2004) is a pedagogical theory used to overcome bottlenecks to learning. Besides providing a framework for analyzing the reasons for students “stuckness”, the model employs a systematic scaffolding to lead students through the bottleneck. In this session, faculty will ‘decode” the tacit knowledge of experts, the disciplinary assumptions and mental tasks in their field in order to make them available to students. Participants will view videotapes of and conduct Decoding interviews, develop modeling metaphors, and discuss possible applications to their own teaching.

Joan Middendorf serves as Lead Consultant at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and Adjunct Professor in Educational Leadership at Indiana University Bloomington. Along with David Pace, she developed the Decoding the Disciplines method for helping students learn disciplinary thinking. Diaz and Shopkow joined them to apply it to the discipline of history; the four have published widely and led faculty workshops around the world in many disciplines. As a Co-Director of the History Learning Project, she received the 2008 Robert Menges Research Award from the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education and the 2009 McGraw-Hill – Magna Publications Outstanding Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award. When not working on her urban farmstead, Joan likes to kayak, hike, and practice T’ai Chi.

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to teachers@lmu.edu or x85866.

This presentation is part of Rach Washburn's CTE Faculty Associate Project on Engaging Students in Disciplinary Ways of Knowing and Practicing. 

Additional workshop offered by Dr. Middendorf:

Decoding Writing

This program will be video and audio taped and may be podcast. By your willing participation in the program, you expressly and irrevocably consent to be photographed, videotaped and/or audio taped and quoted/cited. The films, tapes, and other digital recordings will become the property of the Center of Teaching Excellence, LMU.