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Mindi Mull, PhD Associate Director of Faculty Support and Development, SSBS Thank you, David and Richard, for sharing your ideas! Your suggestions for guiding students through difficult material are very valuable. This is something I consider quite a bit. It is easy to get bogged down in the details when there may be many problems present in a piece of student work. However, taking a step back and considering what the big issues are for a student is incredibly important. As Richard's entry portrays, there is no point in "going into the weeds," and trying to correct every single problem/error when a student first needs to overcome a major learning obstacle. Once students experience this conceptual shift, or as David put it, have that "Aha!" moment, they feel very encouraged and motivated, and now have the mental energy to address the other problems. We (faculty and students) often want quick results. But deep learning takes time. David's and Richard's entries are important reminders of this. Do you have an approach, strategy, or suggestion you think others would find useful? Please share! You can send your ideas to me (mmull@ncu.edu) for inclusion in an upcoming faculty newsletter. Thanks! As mentors, I feel our task is to make students feel comfortable not knowing key concepts, and gently help them over the bridges. Just a few words like "this is a tricky concept, and I struggled a lot with it when I was training for my doctorate study" or "research does tend to have its own language, and it takes time to get to grips with all the definitions and concepts." Some of our students are respected professionals in their field, and struggle with the experience of not understanding something they feel should be easily understood. I feel it is part of our skill set to identify what the threshold concepts are for each of our students, and then make them feel comfortable taking their time to understand the concepts. My experience is that if we rush them, they tend to rote learn or quote their way through the concepts rather than engaging with the deep understanding they need. I won't say I am successful all of, or even most, of the time, but understanding the theory of threshold concepts and how it plays out in all students has certainly made me more sensitive to asking the threshold concept question. You may find it useful to do the same. References • Darwin, C. (1860). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Nature (2nd ed.), London • Hamilton, W. D. (1964a). The genetical evolution of social behavior: II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-16. • Hamilton, W. D. (1964b). The genetical evolution of social behavior: II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 17-52. • Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (2005) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning, Higher Education, 49 (3), 373-388. • Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (2006) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Issues of liminality, In: Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (eds.), Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, London and New York: Routledge, pp 19-32. • Sherman, P.W. (1985) Alarm calls of Belding's ground squirrels to aerial predators: Nepotism or self-preservation? Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 17, 4, 313–323. doi:10.1007/BF00293209