The Indiana University Decoding the Transition to College Project

The Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project

One of the greatest challenges facing education in many countries today is the disjunction between high school and college teaching.  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 assure that more students can smoothly make the transition from one level to the next.

In 2022 Indiana University launched a pilot program, the Decoding Transitions to College Project, that has been exploring new ways to bring groups of high school and college teachers together using the Decoding framework. Teachers from the two levels of the educational system conducted Decoding interviews with each other to explore bottlenecks to learning in their disciplines that were apt to block students’ progress from one level to the next. In addition to developing new strategies for helping students make a smooth transition to college, the high school teachers got a better understanding of the college courses that they were preparing students for and the college teachers learned more about the kinds of preparation their students had received before arriving in college.

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.

The enthusiastic response of the fellows in the program responded to the opportunity presented in this project strongly suggests both that Decoding can be as helpful to high school teachers as it is to those teaching at the university level and that it can be a provide a bridge for uniting the efforts of teachers and administrators on both sides of the institutional divide to help students make the transition to college. The participants in the program not only developed new strategies for helping more students, but they are also activitely engaged in spreading  these ideas to colleagues and more broadly.

A fuller description of this program will sopon be available in ““Decoding Transitions to College: Crossing the High School/College Frontier,”  which is in press. Below are links to transcripts of interviews conducted by some of the fellows in the program. They demonstrate the applicability of the process to both high school and college teaching and the ease of communication across the high school/college frontier.

David Pace and Rebecca Itow

Co-Directors

Indiana University Decoding Transitions to College Project.

Interviews from the Decoding Transitions to College Project

Below are links to transcripts of some of the interviews the fellows in the Decoding Transitions Project conducted with each other. They have been lightly edited to remove extraneous information and make oral comments more intelligible in a written form. We are very grateful to the fellows for allowing us to share this material.