Designing Integrated Curriculum

I feel that integrated curriculum is a very important thing for educators to consider. After watching the video Designing Integrated Curriculum by BIE a few things came to the forefront for designing projects across content areas:

• Have knowledge of what benchmarks were achieved by students in other classes.
  • Find places where the standards overlap
  • Write your own class benchmarks to include the skills of other classes.
• Core content and career teachers need time to work together.
• Begin with the end in mind.

This process allows teachers to gain perspective and get exposure to what their colleagues are doing. It also if done appropriately allows teachers to forge closer relationships with those that they work with. This can ultimately allow for greater student success if there is cohesion among staff members.

 

This brings me to now thinking of how to make this a reality in the school that I teach for. About 90 minutes prior to writing this I accepted a new position as a social studies and business teacher at a local high school. I will be starting out with a whole new staff to work with and all new students to see each day too.

 

The school I will be working for, Cromwell-Wright Schools, is 1:1 chromebook for grades 5-12. This resource allows all students to have universal access to the same technology regardless of what class they are in. This is a major plus. All students also have their own Google Drive accounts too for easy organization between classes.

 

Getting other teachers to buy in is usually the challenge in this though. With a new principal and colleagues I feel the approach needed on my end is to show the value added to the other staff and their classes. How can they, with some extra time on the front end, work with me an others to create experiences for students that take what they learn in one course, and apply it to others. Once I know who might be willing to work with me on it, a request for time to create a viable project could be asked for to the principal. I don’t think preparation time is something that can be downplayed. It takes time to create a project and if it isn’t going to be done right, frankly, it probably is not worth doing then.

 

Finally, once an integrated project is run and successful, I believe letting other staff know about it would be very important. It is always hard to jump into something that you haven’t had experience with. It is even harder when you have no experience and haven’t seen it done before. Having a thought out process of how you plan to share the success with other teachers is going to be an important step in the process to think of.