Once the interviews began revealing bottlenecks to learning in our courses and the steps that are needed to get past them, we could move on to steps 3, 4, and 6 in the “decoding the disciplines” process, i.e. modeling operations for students, giving them an opportunity to practice and get feedback, and assessing students ability to perform specific operations at the end of the process. Therefore in the 2006-2007 school year we worked with faculty and graduate students in six history courses to devise new strategies for helping students to overcome specific bottlenecks. We constructed classroom exercises, assignments, and presentations targeted at particular operations, as well as assessment plans to determine how successful we were at imparting these skills to undergraduates.

In subsequent years we hope to perfect these strategies, at the same time that we develop new ways to teach some of the operations that we have not addressed in the first year.