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The Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm: Seven Steps to Increased Student Learning
Teaching and learning in a college setting has never been more challenging. How can instructors reach out to their students and fully engage them in the conversation? Applicable to multiple disciplines, the Decoding the Disciplines Paradigm offers a radically new model for helping students respond to the challenges of college and provides a framework for understanding why students find academic life so arduous. Teachers can help their pupils overcome obstacles by identifying bottlenecks to learning and systematically exploring the steps needed to overcome these obstacles. Often, experts find it difficult to define the mental operations necessary to master their discipline because they have become so automatic that they are invisible. However, once these mental operations have been made explicit, the teacher can model them for students, create opportunities for practice and feedback, manage additional emotional obstacles, assess results, and share what has been learned with others.
178 pages, Paperback
Published February 27, 2017
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August 5, 2019
I did a lot of going back and forth between nodding along with this book and yelling at it.
The focus on skills and what students need to be able to do is something I really appreciate. Obviously there are things we want students to know after a course, too, but almost always we want them to be able to do something with what they know, and making the doing the focus is helpful. But we have to figure out exactly what those things we want them to do are, and sometimes there are more steps than we realize or remember. Just this past week, a student asked me how I knew when to use what strategy on a counting problem, and it had been so long since I'd really thought about that. That's exactly the kind of question decoding asks.
But for all the focus on different ways of knowing and doing in different fields/subfields throughout this book, there are times when it totally ignores those different contexts--makes strong suggestions that really aren't the best paths forward in some disciplines, acts like service courses aren't a thing. Some other things that bothered me: endorsement of shame and competition as forms of motivation in courses, a huge lack of respect for K-12 (despite claiming otherwise!), encouraging metaphors without any discussion of access to/implications of those metaphors (and then it, uh, uses some of its own metaphors that could have done with more thought), ignoring some student agency.
I really do agree with the main messages, and I found the book helpful. But I went into most of the chapters feeling like, "Okay, what's the thing that I'm going to be annoyed at this time?"
The focus on skills and what students need to be able to do is something I really appreciate. Obviously there are things we want students to know after a course, too, but almost always we want them to be able to do something with what they know, and making the doing the focus is helpful. But we have to figure out exactly what those things we want them to do are, and sometimes there are more steps than we realize or remember. Just this past week, a student asked me how I knew when to use what strategy on a counting problem, and it had been so long since I'd really thought about that. That's exactly the kind of question decoding asks.
But for all the focus on different ways of knowing and doing in different fields/subfields throughout this book, there are times when it totally ignores those different contexts--makes strong suggestions that really aren't the best paths forward in some disciplines, acts like service courses aren't a thing. Some other things that bothered me: endorsement of shame and competition as forms of motivation in courses, a huge lack of respect for K-12 (despite claiming otherwise!), encouraging metaphors without any discussion of access to/implications of those metaphors (and then it, uh, uses some of its own metaphors that could have done with more thought), ignoring some student agency.
I really do agree with the main messages, and I found the book helpful. But I went into most of the chapters feeling like, "Okay, what's the thing that I'm going to be annoyed at this time?"
Displaying 1 of 1 review