This chapter describes four concepts from the learning sciences that provide research-based recommendations for instructional practice. The authors explore how these teaching approaches manifest in different institutional, disciplinary, and course contexts.

This chapter describes how seven disciplinary bottlenecks from four diverse disciplines were analyzed using a phenomenological perspective and includes a discussion of embodied knowing and implications for educators.

This chapter argues that expert practice is an inquiry that surfaces a hermeneutic relationship between theory, practice, and the world, with implications for new lines of questioning in the Decoding interview.

Deciphering teachers' paths to their disciplinary professional identities can make important elements of their tacit knowledge explicit and available to their students.

This chapter presents the bottlenecks identified by seven faculty members from diverse disciplines and an inductive content analysis of their Decoding interviews. Representative quotations illustrate themes in the interviews and we consider the implications for both faculty development and pedagogical research.

In this chapter we describe the Decoding the Disciplines Faculty Learning Community at Mount Royal University and how Decoding has been used in new and multidisciplinary ways in the various teaching, curriculum, and research projects that are presented in detail in subsequent chapters.

In this chapter, the author focuses on intersectionality as a heuristic means toward an open and affirming classroom and as a model grounded in a larger history of calls for anti-oppressive pedagogy. Three critical pivots set the background to this article. The first is Paolo Freire, who clearly connected social justice with pedagogy and contended…

Ten examples of quick and easy classroom assessment techniques, carried out by higher education faculty in 10 different disciplines, are described. The techniques, designed to inform and inspire faculty to adjust classroom instruction, focus on four dimensions of learning: declarative, procedural, conditional, and reflective. (MSE)

In higher education, there is distinction between what is valued as scholarship and the pragmatic needs of the larger world. In the dominant view of scholarship, research and theory are superior to practice. An alternative view is that, in many fields, knowledge emerges from the complexity and rigors of practice. (Author/MSE)

There are now established methods and models to assess critical thinking in any discipline. The approach selected will depend on how critical thinking is defined, whether national norms are needed, and how the results will be used. (Author)

Follow-up activities are essential to maintaining a writing-across-the-curriculum program. La Salle University created a second stage of program development through new workshops and symposia, collaborative teaching and co-authoring, and opportunities for student involvement. (MSE)

An annotated directory of writing-across-the-curriculum programs in two-year and four-year institutions in the United States and Canada, based on a 1987 survey, is presented. Annotations contain contact names and addresses and information about program design and components. (MSE)

Observation of 401 college teachers indicates that teachers of different academic disciplines (arts/humanities, social sciences, natural sciences/mathematics) differ in the frequency of specific classroom teaching behaviors, but that what makes an effective teacher, in the perception of students, is consistent regardless of discipline.…

Integration of knowledge is as critical to understanding as is new knowledge. Specialization requires new forms of integration. Graduate programs should teach future faculty to synthesize, seek new relationships between parts and whole, relate past to future and present, and find patterns of meaning not seen through traditional disciplinary…

As a result of forces both in society and in their professions, college faculty find it difficult to raise the question of moral judgment with students. However, it is the disciplines themselves that offer the method and substance for values education. (Author/MSE)