A Taste of History and Literature – A Cross- curricular Inquiry Based Lesson

What is Interdisciplinary/Cross- Curricular Teaching? Interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching involves a conscious effort to apply knowledge, principles, and/or values to more than one academic discipline simultaneously. The disciplines may be related through a central theme, issue, problem, process, topic, or experience (Jacobs, 1989).

Interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching is often seen as a way to address some of the recurring problems in education, such as fragmentation and isolated skill instruction. It is seen as a way to support goals such as transfer of learning, teaching students to think and reason, and providing a curriculum more relevant to students (Marzano, 1991; Perkins, 1991).

Values and Benefits of Interdisciplinary/Cross-Curricular Teaching = Applies, Integrates, and Transfers Knowledge According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, while students are learning the basic information in core subject areas, they are not learning to apply their knowledge effectively in thinking and reasoning (Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1989). Interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching provides a meaningful way in which students can use knowledge learned in one context as a knowledge base in other contexts in and out of school (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989).

Many of the important concepts, strategies, and skills taught in the language arts are "portable" (Perkins, 1986). They transfer readily to other content areas. The concept of perseverance, for example, may be found in literature and science. Strategies for monitoring comprehension can be directed to reading material in any content area. Cause-and-effect relationships exist in literature, science, and social studies. Interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching supports and promotes this transfer. Critical thinking can be applied in any discipline.

Increases Motivation Interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching can increase students' motivation for learning and their level of engagement. In contrast to learning skills in isolation, when students participate in interdisciplinary experiences they see the value of what they are learning and become more actively engaged (Resnick, 1989).

Improves Learning Interdisciplinary/cross-curricular teaching provides the conditions under which effective learning occurs. Students learn more when they use the language arts skills to explore what they are learning, write about what they are learning, and interact with their classmates, teachers, and members of the community about what they are learning (Thaiss, 1986).

When teachers identify ways to share curriculum, it aligns learning through multiple disciplines and supports a teacher's creativity. At the same time, students scaffold learning by building their knowledge of one subject upon another.

A Final Thought Quite often Social Studies teachers dispense writing assignments, but we don’t take the time to teach the students how to write. This lesson combines research on a topic of the student’s choosing, with clear directions on how to write effectively, along with multiple chances to revise and edit, and includes a presentation piece in which the students display their claim, reasoning, and evidence.

TED Talk Rubric wrong_with_our_food_system wrong_with_our_food_system Birk Baehr h_the_key_to_success_grit h_the_key_to_success_grit Angela Lee Duckworth