Decoding the Disciplines

Decoding the Disciplines is a process for increasing student learning by narrowing the gap between expert and novice thinking. Beginning with the identification of bottlenecks to learning in particular disciplines, it seeks to make explicit the tacit knowledge of experts and to help students master the mental actions they need for success in particular courses.

The Decoding Wheel is a visualization of the seven steps of Decoding the Disciplines

Guiding questions in the Decoding process

The Decoding process is structured by seven questions. In the Decoding literature these questions usually are referred to as steps. The order of the steps is not mandatory and can be changed as needed.

Question 1: Where does the student experience a bottleneck to learning?

Answering this question is usually the starting point of the Decoding process. Instructors identify an activity or task in their course that students are supposed to learn but often fail. The activity may well be a mental activity.

Question 2: What does the specialist do to get past the bottleneck?

This question leads to a key activity of the Decoding process: Instructors explore in depths the steps that disciplinary experts go through to accomplish the activity or task identified as a bottleneck. This exploration is often carried out via a Decoding interview with typically two interviewers helping the instructor to make his or her expertise explicit.

There are a number of alternative ways to “Decode” the mental move of the specialist besides the interview, “flash” techniques which include analogies and game mechanics, the bottleneck writing tour, concept/mind mapping or flow charting, 3-d modeling with playdough or other simple materials, and rubric building, to name a few. All of the various Decoding techniques involve conversation with an interlocutor, preferably one from a different discipline

Question 3: How can I show students what they have to do?

A way for instructors to do this is by modeling or demonstrating how they accomplish these activities as an expert. In order to do so, instructors may

• Introduce the mental move through analogies, metaphors, or narratives.
• perform the (mental) steps in front of your students using a subject-specific example.
• explicitly highlight critical operations.

Question 4: How can I give my students practice and feedback?

Often instructors provide their students with tasks or learning activities that allow students to perform the activity identified as a bottleneck and receive feedback.

Question 5: How can I deal with emotional bottlenecks to learning?

The Decoding the Disciplines process can lead to considerable changes in teaching. Students might resist such changes. These resistances can be viewed as a further kind of bottleneck which is emotional rather than cognitive. Instructors are encouraged to anticipate such resistances in order to better cope with them.

Question 6: How can I know if my students have mastered these operations?

In order to find out, instructors give assessments that provide information on the degree to which students can perform the activity identified as a bottleneck.

Question 7: How can I share this process with others?

Instructors may share their findings informally with colleagues or more formally through publications or presentations as a form of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. As of 2024 instructors and researchers have published more than 150 articles on Decoding.

History

Decoding the Disciplines has been pioneered by Joan Middendorf and David Pace at Indiana University. David Pace has summarized intentions and goals of this early phase of Decoding the Disciplines as follows:

The Decoding the Disciplines approach emerged from a desire to develop new responses to common blocks to learning in college courses. As directors of the Indiana University Freshman Learning Project from 1998 to 2010, Joan Middendorf and David Pace perceived a mismatch between what was being taught to students in many classes and what was actually required for success in these courses. The very expertise of college instructors had made many essential procedures of the disciplines so automatic that these had become invisible and, thus, were not being taught. Students, trying to respond to the demands of their courses, were often unintentionally given conceptual maps of the field that lacked instructions for surmounting crucial challenges. It was as if their instructors had provided their students with the kind of itinerary produced by Google Maps, but had inadvertently omitted many lines of the instructions. Students who were already familiar with the territory found their way with little difficulty. A few students with usual skills at pathfinding turned the limited set of clues at their disposal into a strategy for reaching the destination. But others, who were not pre-educated in the field or endowed with a special predisposition for the discipline, became hopelessly lost.

The Evolution of Decoding

Excerpted from Middendorf, J. (2025). The Theory Bottleneck and Decoding the Disciplines. Didaktikzentrum, pp. 5-6.

Decoding the Disciplines did not spring from whole cloth but evolved over several years from a framework to a model to a theory. It was born in 1996, when the Vice Chancellor of Indiana University Bloomington invited [Joan] to form a team for an eight-day leadership institute facilitated by Pat Hutchings (Hutchings, Sciame-Giesecke, & Bender; 1996). Teams from all eight Indiana University campuses were tasked with creating new programs to enhance teaching. One of the professors I invited to join the Bloomington team was David Pace. The Bloomington team’s idea was to bring together instructors of large gateway courses and place them in conversation with the literature on teaching and learning in a two-week, cross-disciplinary summer seminar, entitled “The Freshman Learning Project” (FLP). Upon the FLP’s inception, we immediately encountered a problem: With thousands of teaching methods to choose from, but no organizing theory, it was as though we had available to us both everything and nothing.

After learning of the bottleneck idea (Anderson, 1996), we worked it into the second FLP seminar. Bottlenecks did not offer a solution to our too-many-methods problem; nevertheless, it gave us the first step of our framework and afforded each instructor autonomy in choosing a focus for their efforts. Those familiar with David Pace and me know that each of us is inherently disinclined to abandon learners or instructors stuck in the bottleneck. Together with the FLP participants, we began experimenting with ways to get through the bottlenecks.

Some of the experiments turned out better than others. For example, we challenged one of the deans, an administrator and project funder, to re-experience novice learning. After a one hour knitting lesson, he demanded that we “NEVER DO THAT TO ANOTHER PROFESSOR AGAIN!” In our next experiment, we interviewed a religious studies professor and dean, inviting him to pick something that his students struggled with in class. It turned out that his students were not reading in the ways he wanted. His course used different kinds of texts, requiring four kinds of reading: skimming for popular fiction; close readings for translated Biblical texts; analyses for research articles; and positionality for author identity. He realized he had never explained the differences in reading approaches. This experiment resulted in our first Decoding interview. These two administrators became key boosters of the FLP and funders of the change we were bringing to campus (Middendorf, 2001).

With their ongoing support, we led the seminar for eleven consecutive years, which allowed for continual refinement of the Decoding framework. In collaboration with instructors and other partners over the early years of the summer FLP seminar, we refined activities into a model and eventually a theory. In 2004 we presented at the first ISSOTL conference and published our model (Middendorf & Pace, 2004), editing the volume that featured the ways instructors from various field applied Decoding, evidence that the sharing Step (Step 7), which we deliberately designed to encourage analysis and inquiry in SoTL, worked. With Decoding the Disciplines, we had found an elegant structure to guide our work, a framework that filled a gap in theory, and a model for lesson design.

Further, Decoding has been enriched and transformed by Disrupting the Disciplines (Lindstrom, Easton, Yeo, & Attas, 2022), with its focus on the heretofore hidden or avoided bottlenecks of colonialism, racism, identity, implicit bias, and related antiracist pedagogies."

Taking the Disciplines Seriously With the formation the History Learning Project, with Arlene Diaz and Leah Shopkow of IU's history department, we continued our classroom experiments with Decoding and were able to better articulate our understanding of the disciplines:

We would define disciplines, then, as epistemic communities, communities of knowing, that produce knowledge through certain tacitly agreed-upon rules governing mental moves. We expect our students to be able to make the moves of the disciplines in our classrooms and to understand the rules…. However, they tend to organize their courses around specific contents rather than around the mental moves they want students to make…. These moves are usually unarticulated within a discipline and may even be so completely internalized by practitioners that they are not aware of them. Not surprisingly, instructors do not teach these moves explicitly, and students, who have experienced many years of schooling in which they were not instructed in disciplinary modes of thought, may not even realize that particular kinds of thinking are called for in a discipline.” - Excerpted from Middendorf & Shopkow, Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks, p. 2).

Decoding the Disciplines as a framework

Decoding is highly integrated and integrative. It combines elements of research on expertise and misconceptions, of professional development, of coaching, of collegial counseling, and of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning into a process of teaching development, which acknowledges the difficulties students have in learning subject-specific patterns of thought and action as inherent to processes of teaching and learning. Decoding focuses on the difficulty of the subject matter in a systemic way. It avoids infertile thinking that seeks the failure of teaching primarily among students, or in a wrong selection of teaching method.