EDTECH 542: Week 5 Reflections

Designing Integrated Curriculum

(Interdisciplinary Instruction)

What is Interdisciplinary Instruction? 

Taken from the website eduplace.com:

“Interdisciplinary teaching involves a conscious effort to apply knowledge, principles, and/or values to more than one academic discipline simultaneously. The disciplines may be related through a central theme, issue, problem, process, topic, or experience (Jacobs, 1989). The organizational structure of interdisciplinary teaching is called a theme, thematic unit, or unit, which is a framework with goals/outcomes that specify what students are expected to learn as a result of the experiences and lessons that are a part of the unit.”

Benefits

The following table is a list of some of the benefits that I have identified as being outcomes for integrated instruction.

Teachers	Students
Team Planning Develop cohesion in content areas Dont have to work in isolation Allows for constructive feedback Professional development Improved Instruction	Increase motivation and engagement Increase in depth learning Knowledge application Make connections 21s Century Skill Development Authentic project based learning

Challenges

Most of the challenges I have Identified are directly related to the infrastructure and logistics involved in a school for the implementation of integrated instruction.  

No shared planning time Lack of administrator support Large student population Teacher teams not possible Scheduling issues

Is this a reality in your school?

Currently the ability for my school to become interdisciplinary in their approach to teaching currently seems to be an impossibility. In a large high school setting with over 80 teachers and 1500 students the logistics needed to coordinate this instructional approach is very challenging. Students have many different choices in the classes that they can take based on their interest and ability. Having the same students take the same teachers who work together to plan an interdisciplinary unit is not possible. The current schedule does not allow for any shared planning time. I did once work in a middle school where students took basically the same track of classes and there were grade level teams. Middle Schools usually are smaller and student usually have the same teachers making for this type of instruction easy to manage.

Images retrieved from: http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/103011/chapters/What-Is-Integrated-Curriculum%C2%A2.aspx