Editing Decoding Transitions to College (section)

== The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project ==

=== The Vision ===
One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the dis-junction between high school and college education.  There is a chasm between these two institutional and cultural systems that prevents both easy communication among teachers at the two levels and the development of strategies to ensure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.
[[File:Image from 2022 Transitions Proect.jpg|thumb]]
In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program using Decoding the Disciplines to help bridge the gap between these two educational levels. Small groups of high school and college teachers were brought together to identify bottlenecks to learning that hinder the progress of many of their students from one level to the next. To provide perspectives from both within and across disciplines, fellows in the program were drawn from biology and Spanish in the first year of the program and from chemistry and English in the second. Each year the teachers participated in a series of in-person and online meetings in which they were introduced to the Decoding process, shared experiences about where their students frequently got stuck, and conducted [https://decodingthedisciplines.org/how-it-works/uncover-the-mental-move.html Decoding interviews].

After the conclusion of the summer program, the fellows used the insights that they had gained from the program to redesign their courses. They shared their new strategies for helping more students overcome common obstacles to learning, first with the other fellows in the program and then with other teachers in a broad range of venues.

This program goes beyond the original 2004 model of Decoding (Pace, D. & Middendorf, J (2004) ''Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking'') in three ways. First, it focuses not on responding to specific bottlenecks in a single course, but rather on larger institutional challenges that occur in multiple courses. Secondly, it follows the model developed at Mount Royal University ( Miller-Young, J. & Boman, J. eds.(2017). ''Using the Decoding the Disciplines Framework for Learning Across Disciplines'' ) for using the Decoding interview as a means of bringing groups of teachers together in strong faculty learning communities. And, thirdly, it expands the scope of the paradigm to include high school, as well as college teachers.