In my grade 6 class in the IB school
In my grade 6 class in the IB school, I did a cross curricular project with the language and drama teachers (Kochar, 2016). We took a math story; the language teacher taught the kids how to convert it to a script and the drama teacher gave the nuances of role play to the kids. Then the kids performed the play in front of the drama teacher’s class and asked math questions to the audience in the end. This was one of the very successful projects that I have run so far.
In working this out, we defined the 3 core areas very clearly which were:
(a) defining the core purpose,
(b) exploring our ideas and
(c) mapping our aligned and non-aligned spots (Tran, 2015).
We were very clear that we wanted to work together to give
an experience of ‘integration of knowledge’ to the kids, we listened to each
other intently and then together built a flow of work where we worked together
for the aligned areas and allowed each other to work independently for the
non-aligned areas. For example, I had freedom to choose the math questions, the
language teacher to teach script writing and the drama teacher to build the
rubric to be used for assessment of the drama.
Initially we were
a little afraid as we had opened our class doors for the others (Edutopia,
2015) but as we worked, completely focused on creating a learning experience
for the kids, we found ourselves focused and the kids responded well too. I
know that this is not STEM, but metaphorically it does indicate the possibility
of a collaborative project with other teachers for the kids in the middle
school.
We could not do many of these as I saw that it required a special kind of relationship between the teachers. One with expertise, confidence and the ability to give space to the others that allowed the three of us to work together very well. I am not sure if it is possible with any set of teachers unless there is a good leadership involved.
In our case, we did it ourselves when I approached them to
set the ball rolling…!
References
·
Edutopia.
(2015, August 26). Teacher collaboration: spreading best practices
school-wide [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/85HUMHBXJf4
·
Kochar, M. (2016, May 9). Maths Cross curricular
project. Maths cross curricular project. Retrieved May 7, 2022, from
https://humanemaths.blogspot.com/2011/10/drama-maths-english-cross-curricular.html
·
Tran.
(2015). If you want better collaboration around STEM, build
infrastructure. Download the document.
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