Decoding Faculty Learning Communities
Since its inception Decoding has been a collaborative undertaking, and the most effective way to pursue this work is in the company of like-minded scholars of teaching and learning. Here are some suggestions of ways to proceed.
- Form a faculty reading group and share some of the works on Decoding
- Attend a decoding workshop at a conference, bring a speaker to your campus, or watch an example of an interview (e.g. The Decoding Interview, Live and Unplugged)
- Read some of the essays in Janice Miller-Young and Jennifer Boman, eds. Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 150. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass and observe how groups of faculty at Mount Royal University came together around decoding interviews to form powerful learning communities
- Identify others who would like to explore this work together
- Reach out through local teaching centers to contact teachers in other fields who are interested in exploring Decoding
- Approach other teachers at your institution who are concerned with a particular cross-disciplinary teaching challenge (e.g. introducing environment thinking into courses or helping international students) and work together, using Decoding to discover new responses
- Make the decoding process a part of departmental discussions of teaching and learning by identifying common bottlenecks to learning, making explicit the basic mental operations that are problematic in your discipline, and organizing the unit’s curriculum around the systematic modeling of key skills, as revealed by the Decoding process
- If you have difficulty finding colleagues at your institution interested in exploring this work together, reach out to others through the Decoding the Disciplines List Serve and create a virtual learning community
- You can join the list serve by emailing David Pace at dpace@indiana.edu
