Week 5 Reflection - EDTECH 542

Option 1: Designing Integrated Curriculum At some point you may consider including other disciplines in your project (if you haven't already). Watch the video below on Designing Integrated Curriculum and reflect on the benefits of interdisciplinary projects and the challenges in implementing them. How might you go about making this a reality in your school?

I really enjoyed watching the Designing Integrated Curriculum video, as it illustrated the power and potential that's possible when teachers from different disciplines are able to work together. Since I started teaching at my current school, I have been intrigued by the idea of cross-curricular collaborations.

The parallels between history and English are obvious. It would be wonderful to be able to sequence a unit of novel study during the same time that the time period comprising the setting of that novel was being studied in history class. With my 9th grade students, this would mean, for example, reading To Kill a Mockingbird during the time students were studying The Great Depression, and working with American history teachers to create assignments.

With science, opportunities exist for collaboration regarding DNA, cells, and bioresearch, as my AP 11 students must read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a true story about a woman whose cells have been used in research and continue to reproduce. 

In math, as students become more familiar with the Flipped Classroom model, students themselves will begin creating tutorial videos on a variety of mathematical subjects. I could teach those same students strategies for giving effective presentations via video, drawing on speech and communications standards.

The chief obstacle for these collaborations is planning time. Simply put, the educational model that has teachers in the classroom for 80 percent of their day leave no time for curriculum integrations to occur. Until teachers are given planning time to even begin considering such collaborations, they will, unfortunately, never happen. If administrators truly value these kinds of interactions and collaborations in their buildings, they will need to find a way to give their staffs an opportunity to meet, brainstorm, and plan such lessons.