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I am going plunge into this first blog post at the last minute. I have been thinking about this entry since our first Face-to-Face session in October, and I have been thinking about my focus since then. After reflecting on the Power of Three planning sheet, I have identified my students’ three most urgent learning needs as
- Developing and honing their organizational skills
- Making connections between what they are learning in different classes, both in terms of content and skills
- Making connections between what they are learning in school and the outside world
Based on these needs, I decided to speak to some of my current students and colleagues about a project we tried last year for the first time. The project was the culminating task for Grade 9 Geography, a First Ministers Meeting to discuss climate change in Canada. As part of this project, the geography teachers worked with the science teachers to build connections between the two courses. I was interested in whether my students (now in grade 10) remembered the project, which they had completed recently, and whether or not they found the connections between the two courses clear and valuable.
Not shockingly, the grade 10 students that I spoke with remembered the project, but required some prompting to to recall the connections with Science class. They remembered me coming to watch some of their presentations about climate change in Science, but didn’t think that the connections had been all that clear. When speaking with some of my colleagues, the same idea about needing to improve the links came up. We know that we can make the connections more meaningful, but we’re not quite sure how (without a significant amount of extra work).
So, this leads me to some questions I hope to think about during this Cohort 21 experience:
- How might we create meaningful interdisciplinary connections for our grade 9 students?
- How might we ensure that skills and content that are learned in one class can be applied to and built upon in another?
- And how might we do this without creating too much additional work?
Hey Katherine! This is crazy BUT this is exactly the same thing I want to investigate through Cohort 21!! We have been doing an interdisciplinary unit in grade 10 between the World Issues course and the Science course on climate change for a few years, but we still can’t seem to get it right! I can’t believe how similar our questions are. I hope we can find a time to chat during the next F2F! I would love to get your input and insights and hopefully we can bounce some ideas off of each other. See you tomorrow!
@kjoyce,
I love that your interviews with students automatically led to more questions. It’s amazing what we find out about our students and ourselves when we simply ask.
I’ve recently been moving the entire Humanities department at my school to develop a standards-based curriculum for all Grade 9- 12 classes. I’m not going to lie, there has been some additional work, especially around simplifying the curriculum expectations for each subject and creating student-friendly documents and criteria sheets that speak a common language. I believe, however, once this shared language is achieved, greater innovation in the classroom can take place, with students, teachers, and parents being able to track explicit learning skills that are repeated or revisited year after year.
These are exciting times for education. All the ideas of the past can be sharpened. Our tool box is expanding.
Those are great questions to dive into! I think it’s great that you and your colleagues took the first step in creating a cross curricular project, and tried to create meaningful links.
Could you have a beginning, middle, and end prompt that asks students how the two subjects support or interact with each other when it comes to climate change?
I’m looking forward to future posts to see the interesting answers to your questions!
Hi @kjoyce
Your first C21 blog is in the books, nicely done! You have identified some terrific learning needs that I think all teachers can certainly appreciate and relate to. I think that the need for students to “make connections” between skills and content, classes, their learning, and with one another is greater than ever before! As I mentioned during our Google Hangout, you should check out @jweening‘s blog “Tis the Season: on Authentic Assessments”. In this blog, she writes about finding a real audience for students work, as a mode of motivating them to produce work that is meaningful to them. In addition, I am happy to speak in more detail about my experience with facilitating the 20time Project at my school. You have ended your blog with some great questions, that will make a great basis for tomorrow’s work during our F2F. I look forward to seeing you at UTS, and where you Action Plan goes after tomorrow’s session!
Cheers,
Nicole
Great questions Kathryn!!
These have further implications for interdisciplinary connections beyond grade 9 as well. Your action plan directly links to a broader aim of creating cohesive and authentic learning experiences for students across the curriculum with respect to prescient issues such as climate change (as well at Truth and Reconciliation). I look forward to discussing further at our next F2F!