Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks: Decode the Critical Thinking of Your Discipline

This is a book for faculty who want their students to develop disciplinary forms of reasoning, and are moreover interested in a methodology with the potential to transform and reinvigorate their teaching.

About the Author
Joan Middendorf is Lead Instructional Consultant in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and Adjunct Professor in Educational Leadership at Indiana University. Joan Middendorf's specialty lies in leading faculty to help make disciplinary ways of thinking available to students in such groups as a Media School, Latino Studies Program and NSF-funded STEM groups at universities around the world. With David Pace she developed and published the "Decoding the Disciplines" model. As co-director of the History Learning Project (HLP), she has focused on emotional bottlenecks to learning. Along with Professors Diaz, Pace, and Shopkow the HLP won the 2008 Menges Research Award from the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education and the 2009 McGraw-Hill - Magna Publications (Weimer) Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award. Among her many publications, she was first author on the 2015 "What's feeling got to do with it? Decoding emotional bottlenecks in the history classroom," which appeared in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 14. Leah Shopkow is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. Leah Shopkow examines medieval historiography in her disciplinary work, which provided a natural segue into history pedagogy. A founding co-director and the PI of the History Learning Project (HLP), her recent publications include "The History Learning Project 'Decodes' a Discipline: The Union of Epistemology and Teaching" in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines (2013) as and "From Bottlenecks to Epistemology in History: Changing the Conversation about the Teaching of History in Colleges and Universities" in Changing the Conversation about Higher Education (2103) as first author. With Arlene Díaz she has written "A Tale of Two Thresholds," in Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2017) and has had an article entitled "How Ma