Monday, March 18, 2013

Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Ed Week has an article here describing how common core requirements fit well into interdisciplinary units.    


I have a few observations:

For secondary teachers, often with five classes and over a hundred and fifty students every day, this doesn’t seem doable.  When would they have the time to do this planning? Well, commercial outfits will just move in and sell canned curriculum to districts.  Sigh.

As far as students go, if the students are excellent readers, and highly motivated, I can see these integrated courses being interesting..  For the average student—who is a mediocre reader and not very motivated—I can see these kind of reading assignments being overwhelming, which means many, probably most, students won’t do them.  They’ll read a summary of the books on the Internet, or ask their better-reading friends.

Cross-curricular work doesn’t get at the heart of the education crisis.  It is mostly just a re-packaging of current practices.  For students to be truly educated, they need to form a love and habit of reading.  This only happens when students are allowed to choose most of their own books.

No comments:

Post a Comment