Deeper Learning: Why Cross-Curricular Teaching is Essential
It is time for school officials and teachers to face the reality that public education has hit a wall and cannot progress farther. With regard to individual education and learning, we have pretty much reached our limit at this point. Although it may have been effective for earlier generations, it is not up to par with what is required of kids in today’s and tomorrow’s classrooms in terms of more in-depth learning. Thankfully, merging the efforts of teachers and combining contents that are relevant can hasten the process of learning more deeply, which, in effect, opens up new channels through which knowledge can flow.
Learning at a deeper level is analogous to drinking heavily from a single well of information, as opposed to merely sampling the contents of a number of distinct wells. Instead of merely sampling all of the different streams of knowledge that are available, students who are engaged in deep learning will instead follow one line of inquiry all the way to its source. Teachers are all too familiar with the pressures from the outside world that encourage them to restrict the amount of water that their pupils can take from any one well.
Requirements
Unfazed, teachers remain dedicated to their mission of giving pupils unrestricted access to the pool of in-depth information that will enable them to realise their full potential. However, in order to move beyond the existing eye-dropper doses of information sampling in school curricula, it is necessary for teachers and administrators to comprehend and embrace a few key points, including the following:
1. The heart, mind, body, and soul of both the student and the instructor are engaged in the process of deep learning.
2. It calls for enthusiastic collaborators, including students, parents, and members of the community.
3. It calls for an extensive amount of planning. Sharing her experience of incorporating TED Talks into her curriculum, Heather Wolpert-Gawron demonstrated what it is that teachers need to do in order to develop effective learning experiences that foster deep learning.
4. The assessment should be based on the learning. Shawn Cornally made some excellent recommendations on how educators could convert their gradebooks (and their perspective on instruction) into logbooks, which represent students’ levels of mastery of learning objectives rather than only the completion of assignments.
5. Working together is an absolute requirement. Rebecca Alber emphasised that in order for students to become expert learners who can demonstrate their knowledge through application and creation, teachers need to instruct them on how to acquire knowledge and skills through collaborative means.
Deeper learning necessitates that groups of instructors pool their skills, resources, time, and efforts to optimise coherence, relevance, and connections among the many curriculum areas in order for all of this to happen in a way that is sustainable in our schools.
Cross-Curricular Teams
It should go without saying that the practise of isolating instructors must come to an end; yet, student learning will continue to be stalled at the dam as long as teachers continue to teach in silos and do not begin to place information in the context of other fields of study. The time has come for educators to work together.
Teachers are required to make the initial move, swim to the opposite side of the building, and initiate a partnership with a colleague who teaches in a different department. Work together with other teachers of the same grade level to read math and scientific texts, for instance, and uncover issues that are similar across both subjects. This will help elementary school teachers get ready to teach math and science together, rather than separately.
The process of teacher collaboration and interdisciplinary teaching can be broken down into three broad phases:
Aligned \sCooperative \sConceptual
Collaboration Based on Alignment
Begin with alignment as the first step in any cooperation. The first thing that you should do is jump in and begin wading in the same direction as your other colleagues in the teaching profession. When a department of social studies and a department of English work together to plan the school year in such a way that subjects of study in history are taught concurrently with literary eras, this is an example of aligned collaboration. The two departments must first reach an agreement that DBQs (Document Based Questions) can count for English credit as well as social studies credit. Students are able to lay a foundation this manner and are better able to generalise what they have studied in history because they are able to recognise the effect that what they have learned has had on literature.
Cooperation and concerted effort
You and your colleagues educators need to get your strokes in sync so that they can keep up with your pace. For instance, a math teacher and a science teacher might get together to discuss the most effective method and the most appropriate time to teach motion, and then they might reach a consensus to help each other teach it, either individually or together. When the math instructor wants models to show students what the math is good for, he acquires them from the science teacher, and when the science teacher requires the students to complete mathematical calculations, she applies the same method that the math teacher used just a week earlier. Students are better able to keep their heads above water and comprehend challenging subject matter like math and physics when taught in this manner.
Collaboration on the Conceptual Level
Last but not least, in order to facilitate conceptual collaboration, a teacher needs to fully submerge themselves in the conceptual understanding of the other subject area. To put it another way, the instructor needs to have a deep understanding of both disciplines and be able to teach them both conceptually. Because it is difficult for a single instructor to be an expert in two different disciplines, the solution is to combine efforts and teach subjects together as a team.
When a science teacher works closely with an art teacher to teach students about the science of wavelengths, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the dual nature of light, this is an example of conceptual collaboration. The goal of this type of collaboration is to help students understand the effect that pigments and light have on one another. Or when a historical studies teacher and a scientific teacher partner up to conduct a project-based learning exercise about the Renaissance period, highlighting how history influences science and how science affects history. This is an example of a triple gainer into the deep end.
As was just illustrated, we can encourage “deep learning” by encouraging multiple teachers to collaborate in helping students understand math in the context of science, by coordinating timelines of scientific discovery and literary works, and by demonstrating how a painter uses light to express meaning in their work. This situation is analogous to what takes place to a river when it is split up into too many smaller streams. After the streams have been combined and funnelled together, the water flow may become more intense. The same may be said for education. The flow of information for the learner is made clearer, the learning activities are made more fluid, and the student’s reservoir of knowledge and abilities is filled up faster when professional educators combine their efforts and reinforce the same deep learning.
Where Does That Leave Students?
One difficulty remains. After spending years merely absorbing information, it can be extremely difficult to convince pupils to engage in meaningful learning. If students are rarely thirsty, it is difficult to convince them to consume knowledge at all, much less drink it in any significant quantity. Parched minds become content with the bare minimum in terms of educational requirements, and some students, particularly as they approach the middle and high school levels of education, begin to assume that school cannot slake their thirst as well as other possibilities available in society.
When teachers collaborate, they can assist pupils in regaining the natural curiosity and hunger for information that they were born with. Therefore, the job of every educational team is twofold: first, they need to give a flow of knowledge and skills that is abundant, rigorous, and pertinent; second, they need to discover a means to guide the students to the water, and then they need to make them thirsty enough to drink deeply from it.
Students and teacher teams that focus on learning deeply have the power to achieve learning that goes beyond the traditional education dam and shoots out over the spillway to not only understand the torrent of available knowledge but also add to it in phenomenal ways. This is because deep learning has the force to achieve learning that goes beyond the traditional education dam.
When a river is cut up into numerous smaller streams, the enormous strength that it formerly possessed is significantly reduced. On the other hand, if the streams were to be funnelled together, the water would then be able to flow more rapidly. The same may be said for education. As was just illustrated, we can encourage “deep learning” by encouraging multiple teachers to collaborate in helping students understand math in the context of science, by coordinating timelines of scientific discovery and literary works, and by demonstrating how a painter uses light to express meaning in their work. The flow of information for the learner is made clearer, the learning activities are made more fluid, and the student’s reservoir of knowledge and skill fills up quicker when competent educators combine their efforts and reinforce the same deep learning.