Bottlenecks and Thresholds Initiative
A course design initiative to help faculty improve students' disciplinary thinking and deepen student engagement through writing.
Where do students get stuck? What keeps them from progressing beyond basic understanding? What do students find most difficult in courses? How might faculty better support students in learning what's necessary for disciplinary thinking and in understanding the most integrative concepts in a course?
Faculty who teach general education and/or disciplinary gateway courses are invited to participate in the "Bottlenecks and Thresholds Initiative," a new initiative dedicated to exploring these questions and others like them.
The 2011 Initiative will kick-off during this May’s Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute with a program inspired by historian David Pace, co-director of Indiana University’s History Learning Project, where he has pioneered an approach called “Decoding the Disciplines." This approach is designed to help professors identify the stumbling blocks in their courses where students get stuck and to devise ways to break these bottlenecks down into smaller components. Though the method was originally developed for history courses, it has since been adapted for a range of subjects across the curriculum.
Sometimes, these bottlenecks represent “threshold concepts,” a term coined by Meyer and Land to describe ideas that are fundamental to progressing beyond elementary thinking in a discipline. The idea of threshold concepts has been explored in CNDLS’ pilot “Thresholds of Writing” project, which brought together faculty from various departments to discuss strategies for integrating disciplinary writing practices into introductory level courses. The “Bottlenecks & Thresholds” Initiative will build on these discussions.
Faculty participating in this project agree to rethink a component of a course by focusing on one or more significant stumbling blocks that regularly prove challenging for students. Participating faculty will:
- attend the 3-day seminar May 25-27
- receive a stipend
- meet throughout the year as a community of practice, both in person and virtually
All full-time faculty are eligible, though preference will be given to faculty teaching general education or disciplinary gateway courses, and to teams of more than one member from a particular department. To indicate interest and/or to learn more about the initiative, apply through the TLISI website by March 11.
