Mental moves

Mental moves are the end product of Step 2 Decoding, uncovering the implicit reasoning or task a specialist uses to get through the bottleneck. The mental move summarizes in nominal terms, using two or three words or a short phrase, the DOING as in the underlined phrases below.

Examples

·     Close reading - analyzing a text several times for the key ideas, details, craft and structures; and put in conversation with other texts (a text can be anything that conveys a set of meanings to the person who examines it; not only written texts, but also movies, ads, cartoons, maps, works or art, and even rooms full of people); anything we look at, find layers of meaning in, and draw conclusions from.

·     Primary source analysis - analyzing an artifact from the past for who made it, how it was produced, when it was produced, why, etc.

·     Recursion - writing a piece of code that repeats itself infinitely until told to stop

·     Systems thinking –viewing problems as part of a larger system, and on how the parts interrelate and affect each others’ functioning.

·     Rooting – (T’ai Chi) sending one’s energy to the ground by lowering one’s center of gravity, tipping the hips, and loosening the joints.

Identifying mental moves

Mental moves can be unearthed through interviews (the arduous route) or through more playful or faster, yet still revealing techniques, such as 3-d modeling with playdough, making analogies, Swantje Lahm’s bottleneck writing tour, etc. (see forthcoming articles on Flash Decoding).

Mental Moves and SLOs

When writing a curriculum, after establishing 4-8 overarching program goals, next, for each program goal we identify SLOs (student learning outcomes): What students need to think and DO to accomplish the goal. To spell out the SLOs, it's useful to focus on where students get stuck in reaching this goal--what are the bottlenecks that make learning this goal a challenge? The mental moves uncovered in answering this question make for better, more specific SLOs. Mental moves = SLOs.

• Program goals: Broad statements of the knowledge skills, attitudes, and values expected of students upon graduating from a degree program
• Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs): A specification of the mental moves, especially the difficult ones, of what students will think or DO (may include attitudes) to reach a program or course goal.