Friday, November 09, 2007

Staff Development - Cross Curricular Suggestions for 12-17 Session

This post is primarily for the folks in our staff development, to solicit some ideas for a future session.

As we mentioned in the session this week, for our December 17th session (that's a Monday in the afternoon after finals) we are going to spend some time on cross-curricular discussions (C1 and C2 together). We will be focusing on cross-curricular teaching, which could be anything from a particular topic, an entire unit, or entire teamed classes.

While we have some ideas of how we could structure this time, we really wanted to hear your ideas of what would work best for you. Please leave a comment below.

5 comments:

  1. I think it would first be helpfull to meet with our own areas so that we could discuss cross-curricular teaching and how we might be able to use that in our department. I would then like to be able to meet with our like-department. For example science would meet with math and Language Arts would meet with Social Studies.

    If time allowed we could then meet with a second department.

    This is not very specific but gives a general meeting outline.

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  2. I like the idea above of like-departments meeting. It is a good place to start these discussions.

    If we do have time for departments such as Science and Language Arts to meet, I think it would be helpful if we posted what we teach or the names of each Unit in Semester 1. For example, in Biology we teach: Unit 1: Nature of Science; Unit 2: Cell Processes; Unit 3: Genetics; Unit 4: Evolution. Biology is mostly taken by Sophomores, so I would be curious to know what books most AHS Sophomores read. Also, students turn in a lab report and I would love to team teach grammar, writing skills... with an English teacher.

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  3. I agree that it would be nice to team up with people from other departments. It was funny today - one of my freshmen asked if the English and History teachers meant to teach similar topics at similar points during the semester, because we seem to be having related conversations in both classes! Just one more step in the process, Smith!

    I also like the idea about listing our units. Thus, in Social Studies the units are:
    Freshman US History -
    First semester - American Imperialism, WWI, 1920s, 1930s
    Second semester - WWII, 1950s and 1960s domestically, Cold War, then1970s - present domestically

    Junior Western Civ -
    First semester - Greece, Alexander, Rome, Byzantines, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, English Absolutism
    Second semester - French Absolutism and Revolution, ISMs of the 1800s, Great War, WWII, Cold War - present

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  4. I was thinking along the same lines...I just thought we could write out the units we teach on a big poster board. We could all walk around and add any connections we might think of to the area underneath. It would probably make more sense to do so digitally, so I'm sure we could figure something like that out.

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  5. I think that we need time to work with our own department then we might want to split into departments that might have the easiest time to work cross-curricularly. Math and Science should have some time together and English and Social Studies should work together. I do not know where this leaves everyone else, but I thought these areas should have some time to talk about their subjects.

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