Interdisciplinary Teaching

Objective #1: Understand the benefits and describe key features of interdisciplinary instruction and learning experiences.

Interdisciplinary instruction is a crucial part of teaching in a classroom. Students are able to learn a great deal of content, while applying it to other subjects that are being studied. This form of teaching also allows the students to make connections in understanding what it is they may be learning. Interdisciplinary instruction connects the curriculum with academic standards from many different content areas. For example, a lesson on the United States presidents could be applied to the subjects of language arts, math, and social studies. In language arts, the students could read an article about a specific president and write a report posing as one of the presidents. This will allow the students to learn about the presidents from specific facts and use their writing skills to elaborate their thoughts. The students could learn about the presidents during math by comparing the 3rd president to the 27th president on the number line. The teacher could also integrate math and social studies by using maps (as we learned about in class last week!) Students can learn to read a map and the way maps can appear differently while math could be used to find out the distance between two points! Finally, to integrate social studies, the students could be taught about the president's biographies and what each had done during their presidency to impact the history of the United States.

   Throughout my experience in the classroom, I have seen many teachers use social studies topics during their language arts lessons. Reading a book to students that relates to social studies, not only allows them understand the topic, but allows them to use their reading comprehension to dig deeper into the text, make connections between the text and themselves, make connections between the text and a previous text, or make a connection about the text in relation to the world. The students can make predictions as to what they may think would happen in the book and could pick out words they do not understand in the reading to pose as a class question.
 I feel as though interdisciplinary teaching could be most difficult when preparing to use math and social studies together. As I was researching ideas to use in the classroom, I found a great resource that could be used in my future for both math and social studies together within the classroom. The article below talks about how to use math and social studies together in a lesson on longitude and latitude. In this lesson, students not only learn about longitude and latitude, but also learn "what is a grid" and how to use a grid.

 www.washburn.edu/faculty/tfry/Location,%20loc.doc

Although integrating concepts and subjects can sometimes seem like trouble, it is good to use resources and ideas that make the learning fun for the students. Engaging the students is very important when teaching a  lesson. Grabbing the students attention to begin a lesson could make or break their understanding of the concept. It will also intrigue them to want to learn more. After researching ways to integrate material in the classroom, I discovered this website that gives teachers 10 suggestions for integrating subjects in their classroom. Most of them focus on elaborate thinking within the classroom as well as how to encourage the students to think beyond the box.

http://ctfd.sfsu.edu/feature/top-ten-suggestions-for-interdisciplinary-teaching.htm

Overall, I have realized the extreme importance of integration in the classroom. The students can benefit from learning multiple subjects under one topic. It also assists the teacher in that the classroom focus can be on one topic, but focus on many subjects. Repetition for students is important as well, with the repetition of the topic, in many subject areas, the students will learn a vast amount in the topic while applying it to many subjects.