TT0208: Cross-Curricular Collaboration: The Benefits of Working Across Departments

This week we welcome Katie Clark to the show to share her expertise. Katherine Clark is a Golden Apple Scholar, nationally certified instructor and history department chair at Brooks. She has been teaching for 16 years in Chicago and is an instrumental member of our leadership team. We are constantly stressing the importance of collaboration as a key to surviving the demands of our profession. There is never enough time for teachers to plan units or cover all the material AP courses or curriculum guides suggest in an academic year. Finding a way to help students transfer skills from course to course will help them master the essential standards selected for that grade level. We are going to share how we connect skills and align curriculum between departments without the planning time and resources. The key is just to get started, be flexible, and understand that what you are creating is a work in progress. You will need to share the standards and/or the themes you are covering in each grade level to merge curriculum. Knowing what the other grade level teachers are doing in their classes helps to show the students you are a team. By demonstrating how students can apply science skills in PE or English, it will establish relevance beyond the classroom. All teachers are reading teachers. Remember, it is not about your content, it is about the skills. When you focus on the skills, it will help you to create common language between the teacher teams. Creating questions surrounding your goals will help drive the instruction and reinforce the standards. You want students to be able to analyze a text and be a critical reader. The language and material will become almost irrelevant because you start seeing them transfer the skills to tackle the tasks. We notice that they begin annotating in every class because it has been engrained in the curriculum. Once this happens, you will start seeing ways to link and align various courses moving forward. Coming together will help you create meaningful lessons that engage students and share the workload with a valued colleague. Confidence, discussions, and scores increase when you start working together. Be sure to utilize the resources in your schools. Start small. Get into other teachers rooms to see what they are doing and/or how they teach a skill to get inspiration. When you observe other classrooms, you can develop a relationship with another teacher and observe students you have in common. Teachers can and should be resources to each other. You don’t need a lot of resources to start teaching the reading skills and SEL (social emotional learning). We suggest that you push your schools to have grade level teams to enrich teaching and learning in your community. Examples we used:-The science class learn about ecosystems before the English department began Lord of the Flies and we overlapped writing skills/standards during the unit because both classes we learning how to write labs and essays. -The history department finished talking about Totalitarian governments and English began 1984. -English was doing Devil in the White City and math did measurement on how to construct ___ - “From Scotland to China” 19th Century China and Macbeth. Once we saw the success of casually working together, we decided that we should try to find more ways to align grade level curriculum. The English and history departments in 10th and 11th grade became a humanities department to share the readings and skills as much as possible. When we started doing this we saw an increase in assessment scores, writing, and critical thinking. If you would like to see some of the ideas email Lulu at [email protected]. Do you have some cross-curricular units that you’re proud of? Tell us about your experiences! The post TT0208: Cross-Curricular Collaboration: The Benefits of Working Across Departments appeared first on Teacher Tribes.