Now, I believe we know a lot about the nuts and bolts of teaching. We're doing a good job helping students get the basics, and we're reaching more and more to include that work in our standards-based efforts to teach a lot of knowledge too. How can we help students to have a rich foundation of skills as well as a strong knowledge base? The key is to balance and integrate the skill learning with worthy, developmentally appropriate interdisciplinary units.
What does that mean for me as an educator?
This means that we will have to build our interdisciplinary units so that they include multiple standards, knowledge points, concepts, and skills across discipline, and we'll have to develop those units in ways that create rich, engaging, memorable learning.
Specifically for my team and me that means doing the following:
- Focusing in on the science standards and new social studies standards to build rich units of study that fit into the time available.
- Integrating our reading, writing, and math study into those units when possible.
- Also integrating SEL efforts and community building into these units too.
For me specifically that will mean developing the physical science unit and working with my team to determine how we might further our collective efforts to meet all standards in creative, doable, and successful ways.
There's work to do in this area--work that's creative, child-centered, and meaningful.
