Decoding the Disciplines, it started out as a program for faculty who are teaching large classes. At first we didn't really know what we were doing. We just wanted to help people who are teaching large classes, and overtime it developed into a model for helping people get through stuck places. The stuck places which we called "bottlenecks." And it has now grown into a theory of pedagogy, and what we have found is that the places where students get stuck turn out to be like a red flag of where we aren't showing the students what we do that's a special kind of thinking in our field. It may be that we can do something as an expert in our field that's very complicated, and we haven't broken down that complicated thinking for the students. So they show us those things that we're not teaching them at the bottleneck, and then, Decoding the Disciplines, besides showing you, you know, the bottleneck shows you where the stuck place is, then the rest of the theory shows you how to do basically a task analysis on how to unpack the expert's expertise. Then, the rest of it shows you how to model that thinking for students, how to help them get practice with those crucial operations, with what motivation considerations you should take into account, and how you're going to check - had the students to what extent have they gotten these crucial operations, and where have they gotten it so I can sort of get this feedback system going where I can help them get it better and better. And, eventually then we felt even the seven-step sharing becomes very important because people will click data, analyze it, and when you do that step of sharing it with other people you actually get insights yourself. So, it's not a linear thing anymore. Now it turns out as a theory of pedagogy that because there's ten thousand teaching techniques out there in the field of educational development, when somebody say, wants to help with how to lecture you can just take the part that talks about how to show people how to model and there's principles about how to model that this theory helps us know what to tell people about so it's gone from a practical "solving a problem" to a theory of pedagogy that really guides all of the work that we do.

So Threshold Concepts is a notion that was formulated by Ray Land and Jan Meyer and at the time they were both in England, and it's the idea that disciplines have not at their core, but sort of at their perimeter, some very complex ideas that can be difficult for somebody new to the discipline. But, once, they're grasped, they've really opened up a new way of seeing that discipline. So they don't just embody content knowledge, but they embody ways of thinking that are particular to that discipline. So, once, working with a faculty member here in photography, he was worried that his students weren't really getting how he judged their work. They didn't really think that he had a right to make judgments of their work. I said to him finally; "Have you ever shared with them the idea that art is about solving problems? That artists solve problems?" He said, "well no, I didn't think I'd need to." That was something that was such a basic level thing for him but the students weren't understanding, so it can be just that simple. But once it's understood that way you cross a threshold. That's why it's called a Threshold Concept. To my mind, the trend or idea that's emerging that is being most useful to people really comes down to two different projects. One is the notion of Threshold Concepts; the idea that student's difficulties in learning might be tied to the nature of the discipline. And, to the difference between how experts think and how people who are beginning think. Now, some of that is a really, really old idea. I mean, that was the idea that framed a lot of my research when I first encountered John Bransford's How People Learn. So it's not really a new thing. But the language of Threshold Concepts paired with the methodology of Decoding the Disciplines, it has come out of the work of people in Indiana, as a way of working through that process, that seems to me to be a set of models; both theoretical and practical procedural if you will, that has been really productive. And I think is moving us in new ways. In every field, there are really unique ways of thinking. So in art you might have to have a special way of thinking. In art it might be that you take an idea over here and an idea over here, and an idea up here and you bring them together in a new way. And you have to really show people something. And then, say in chemistry and maybe you're a nanochemist, and you want to look at the tiniest, tiniest things that exist. I don't know what you'd call smaller than an atom. And you want to look at it and you want to be able to see how their operating and you have to look at them. so one is a really small analysis, and another some kind of big synthesis, but both of those kinds of thinking do have some kind of visual aspect to it. So there are parts of the thinking that will be similar, but, the mental part we teach students that, you know, in art we're going to take ideas and bring them together, and that's some of the big meta thinking in art, but we're also doing visualization. But in chemistry, we're doing some visualization but we're really systematically taking things apart. When students can know those are the moves that we do in the field they can see the parts that are similar, we will do some similar things in our chemistry, but I'm also going to do some very different things, and then students all kind of know. Otherwise students tend to go to a chemistry course they try to study the same way and they might even in an art course, you know, say "tell me what to do" you know and art teachers hate to have somebody, all teachers hate to have somebody, say just tell me what to do" but they don't know what the different kinds of thinking methods are.