Sometimes Twitter is just the best little reminder. If you’re like me, you likely skim a few hundred tweets per day with little consequence or the occasional urge to retweet. But every once in a while you stumble upon an important tweet that causes you to pause and think. Early last week, Brad Wuetherick, Executive Director of Learning and Teaching at Dalhousie University, shared this tweet that caught my eyes:

 

What was so eye catching, you ask? Quite simply, the tweet showed me how ignorant I was. I asked myself: “Doesn’t everyone know about threshold concepts?” Clearly, no – not if scholars are still discussing them at important SoTL conferences. And the more I explored Brad’s link the more I realized that I didn’t really  know much about threshold concepts either.

In brief, a “threshold concept” can be defined as a essential information/ideas/theories that students need to understand before they can develop deeper understanding about a subject. In more detail, Mike Flanagan of the University College of London describes eight features of threshold concepts:

  • Transformative: They change the way we look at entire fields of study.
  • Troublesome: They are difficult to rectify with what else we know.
  • Irreversible: They cannot be “unlearned”.
  • Integrative: They allow us to synthesize other insights on the subject matter.
  • Bounded: They are targeted at specific fields of study (or subfields) and serve some sort of defined purpose.
  • Discursive: They develop their own accompanying terminology.
  • Reconstitutive: They might deeply change us as learners.
  • Liminality: They often require a lengthy transition for learners.
    (Read more here: http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html)

Why Threshold Concepts Matter

Whether you know it or not, your discipline has its own set of threshold concepts. You probably don’t know it because you learned them long ago and now they’re simply a part of your understanding. Thus we reach the core problem we often face as GAs and TAs: how do we make sure our students reach an understanding of these concepts? Sometimes we must also ask ourselves if we even understand the threshold concepts that our instructors expect us to.

Given the meta-cognitive level of thinking required to examine what we already know, taking stock of the threshold concepts that have affected us and will likely be required of our students is not easy.  With in the context of the courses you assist in, one way to identify these concepts is to look at a well developed syllabus. Effective curriculum development is oriented around these formative ideas, and so a proper syllabus will often highlight or repeat threshold concepts throughout. Flanagan has also collected SoTL research on threshold concepts across disciplines.

But here’s some food for thought: what are the threshold concepts one must understand to be an effective GA/TA?

 

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