Workshop: Teaching Difficult Concepts 1:30 to 3:30
CATL is sponsoring a workshop on teaching difficult but fundamental disciplinary concepts, what researchers in the UK have called “threshold concepts” – ideas that are central to a particular discipline and reveal non-obvious inter-relationships but are often difficult to learn because they are too abstract, too complex, or even counterintuitive.
When finally grasped these concepts can transform student learning, but until then they often act as stumbling blocks or bottlenecks.
The seven-step inquiry process known as “Decoding the Disciplines” allows faculty to identify disciplinary assumptions and types of thinking that are second nature to experts but can be baffling to novices, such as our students. Faculty will get an overview of the methodology and will see excerpts from videotapes of decoding interviews to uncover expert thinking, the key moment involved in opening this “black box.” Each faculty member will share a “bottleneck” to learning in his or her classroom, and practice the interviewing process. Having defined the expert thinking that caused the student bottleneck, participants will have new insights into the thinking in their disciplines and understand why students have difficulty with disciplinary thinking.
To RSVP for the workshop, contact Katie King (kingcath@elon.edu).
The workshop will be facilitated by David Pace and Joan Middendorf. David Pace is professor of history and co-director of the Freshman Learning Project at Indiana University. He is a fellow in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Mack Center for Inquiry on Teaching and Learning, and in 2010 he received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. Joan Middendorf is Associate Director of Campus Instructional Consulting Center and Adjunct Professor in Higher Education at Indiana University.
David Pace and Joan Middendorf will also present a plenary at the August 19th Teaching and Learning Conference.