“The New Age School and Classroom: Proposing a Cross-Curricular, Team-Based Approach to Learning and Teaching”
ED 333A
July 6, 2000
Submitted by Jee Park, Ami Mehta, Heidi Chang
I. Problem Definition
Jane* has just completed her first year at a prestigious, highly competitive university in New England. She and her mother return to her high school to speak to Jane’s guidance counselor and head of school to discuss her freshman year experience. In particular, Jane tells them that she barely passed her classes. In fact, many of her friends from high school had experienced similar failures during their first year, and she does not understand why. Understandably, Jane’s mother, a member of the school’s Board of Trustees, is disappointed and angry about her daughter’s performance in her freshman year and holds the school accountable. She had enrolled Jane in this particular high school because of its strong reputation of preparing students for college.
Jane went to College Preparatory Academy, a private college-preparatory high school of approximately 400 students. Her class contained about 100 students, and each classroom was shared by roughly 15 students. Her school was considered one of the best private schools in the state and even in the country. Her teachers were knowledgeable and passionate about their field of expertise, and many of them had master’s degrees in their subject and some even had doctorate degrees.
Throughout high school, Jane enrolled in every honors class available, and by her senior year, she had the maximum five advanced placement classes in her schedule. Academics were her first priority, and Jane was a diligent, conscientious student. She did her homework every night, took copious notes during each class period, asked questions, participated regularly, and performed well on her tests, quizzes, and other evaluations. Her hard work had earned her the best GPA in the class.
Her academic history and work habits suggested that she would earn commensurate grades and experience similar success in college. Although Jane put forth the same effort and maintained the same focus on academics, she found that she was not doing as well as she did in high school. In college she grappled with problems that mimicked the situations she would be faced with in her professional life after college, and they required her to synthesize large bodies of information, to extract the seminal parts, and to extrapolate from her current understanding. She felt unprepared to deal with this integrated, cross-curricular approach to education.
Jane’s mother suggests that the school change its curricula and pedagogy so that it truly prepares students for college, as its name contends. Realizing the possible financial implications that Jane’s mother’s dissatisfaction could have upon the school, CPA decides to address the problem. What follows is our plan to assess the current system as well as suggest changes and implementation strategies.
*Based on a true story.
II. Painting the Vision: The New Age School and Classroom
According to the situative learning perspective, students’ learning involves an entire system of physical and human characteristics, of which the student is a part. The current system of education does not prepare students for the problems that they will face after high school. The educational system at the high school level compartmentalizes subjects and does not provide opportunities for students to see the connections among subjects. Furthermore, it lacks the structure needed to offer cross-curricular learning experiences. These characteristics must be taken into consideration when designing The New Age School (NAS) and New Age Classroom (NAC).
Our recommendation is to make immediate changes based on our findings from the preliminary investigation.
Understanding that such changes are radical in nature and could cause some resistance, all parties involved in the system must participate in the creation and implementation of the change(Bellamy, 1996). Therefore, the teachers and administration in particular must “buy in to” the changes in order for the redesign to succeed. They must also understand that design is an iterative process; more than likely the first pass at a redesigned plan will have flaws. The next incarnation of the plan will improve upon the findings of the first. Teachers and administrators would agree that the greatest resources of the school come from within the school: the teachers, administrators, and students themselves. Therefore, they will learn from and teach each other throughout the process of change.
Although there are many components to the NAS, perhaps the two most important in our scope are time and physical space. The NAS will have workspaces for a small team of teachers to meet, and will also provide teachers with opportunities to collaborate with and learn from each other. A collaborative planning time will be included in the weekly schedule, in order for teachers to cooperatively design and plan cross-curricular activities for students. Furthermore, each month, there will also be time in the schedule for teachers to visit another teacher’s classroom in order to learn about his or her practices, pedagogical methods, and other teaching techniques. Teachers will also be encouraged to reevaluate and improve their activities during vacation periods.
Since the teachers are by and large the mediators of learning in the classroom, they must be involved with the process of designing the curriculum from its onset. Whereas the way in which material is taught is as important as the content of the material, we may propose the following line of action in creating an integrated curriculum.
(1)Each teacher’s teaching styles and methodologies are inventoried. Teachers are asked to self-assess the effectiveness of their teaching styles.
(2)A sample of students self-assess their learning styles (ie. Auditory, visual, graphical, etc.) In other words, how do they best learn? Results are collected and analyzed.
(3)Each subject’s curriculum must be inventoried. Each department must develop a list of learning expectations, which should include habits of mind as well as content.
(4)The lists will then be compared and commonalties identified.
(5)Around these overlapping topics, interdisciplinary activities will be developed by teachers in the appropriate departments. Redundancy will be eliminated and students will learn and problem-solve within real-world contexts.
The aforementioned activities will be created using the following design principles (Bellamy, 1996):
(1)Authentic activities that provide children with opportunities to participate in activities similar to those of adults, that are modified with age-appropriateness in mind;
(2)Construction of knowledge by students;
(3)Collaboration among teachers and students;
(4)Appropriate use of technology.
Once an integrated curriculum is established for each grade level, the number of weeks in a course may change from its current length. Furthermore, the number of minutes in each class period may also change depending on the kinds of tasks and activities required in the redesigned curriculum.
On a more local level, the NAC must also be created in order to allow for the integration of subjects, flexibility in physical structure, and teamwork among students and teachers. In order to create an optimal environment for learning we need to take a closer look at the entire infrastructure: the physical and human components.
Ideally, the NAC would consist of team-based teaching, where the teachers would be paired up based on subject matter. For example, since science and mathematics concepts have a great deal in common, the science and math teachers would create an integrated teaching method. Each teacher would teach a certain number of classes in the year jointly, introducing concepts of mutual relevance. The same cross discipline teaching would take place with English and History/ Social Studies. This integrated approach on teaching requires pre-planning the curriculum for each discipline and consistent communication amongst the teachers.
If it is not financially feasible to have two teachers in the same classroom, an alternative plan would be for each teacher to instruct the same lesson in his or her own class. This would require that each teacher be fluent with the content and objectives of the lesson. Since the lessons will be conglomerations of at least two different subjects, there are bound to be gaps in understanding and knowledge on the part of each teacher on the team. Therefore, they will teach each other where ever the gaps occur.
Another essential element is the layout of the classroom. The environment in which the students learn is as important to what they learn. Our recommendation is to create an atmosphere that emphasizes the synergy among subjects. As opposed to having the students move from one room to another, the students would remain in the same classroom, which would be organized to facilitate cross-discipline learning. The classroom space would shared by all subjects. For example, one wall could contain a poster of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the latest science project conducted by a team of students in class. Small groups of students would work at round tables, in order to encourage discussion and collaboration. Each table would have the appropriate technology needed for the discipline. This could include data-gathering equipment, internet access, or word processing capability. These would keep the context of the activity real as well as keeping students accountable for their learning by requiring them to share their assignments within an online discussion, validate their hypothesis with experimentation, or find articles to support a report by searching on the internet.
Once the changes are realized, the teachers must self-assess and examine the successes and failures of the curriculum, teaching methods, schedule, and classroom structure. Students will also be retested in order to determine the level of understanding achieved by the redesigned system. Then, as previously stated, changes will be made to improve the system in its next incarnation, and the process will continue until a satisfactory version of the system is achieved.
III. Preliminary Investigation
Goals and Overview
The NAC is designed to take an integrated approach to learning. We will conduct a preliminary investigation to better assess the current state of the learning environment. Information about the physical and human components in the learning system will help us create a clear action plan to improve existing processes. Then, after assessing and analyzing the data, we will identify the best learning practices, make recommendations to encourage integration, and outline clear steps for implementing change.
The initial observations will set a baseline for the entire research project. The three-part study will focus on the current state of the learning environment and the collaboration between individuals and groups of teachers and students. Part 1 will include gathering general information about the school environment. Part II will entail shadowing and interviewing the teachers and students. Finally, in Part III we will observe the classroom environment.
Subjects
Our study will focus specifically on teachers and students because they have greatest impact on the learning environment. The curriculum developed by the teachers needs to be better understood. Similar concepts and strategies will be identified and used later to create an overall integrated curriculum. The amount of teacher to teacher collaboration also directly impacts the potential for interdisciplinary learning. We will analyze the current processes to better understand the potential for team-based teaching strategies. Finally, the students’ ability to make connections between subjects and to real world situations also clearly indicates whether or not the learning concepts have been integrated appropriately.
Methods
Part I: Baseline Study (gather specific information about the curricula)
It is important to gain an understanding of the physical components of the learning environment to better evaluate observations gathered from the human interactions in the classroom. By physical components, we are describing the school’s vision, culture, value system, academic calendar, and the expectations of the administrators on the teachers. Also included in our examination of the physical components is:
(1)grasping the school’s mission,
(2)understanding how the school applies its educational philosophy to prepare students for college,
(3)viewing a typical academic weekly schedule (focus initially on 9th grade), and
(4)analyzing the curricula content focusing on pairing similar subjects.
Gaining an overall sense of the physical components of the school will enable us to perceive how it interacts with the human components (teachers and students).
Part II: Participant-Observation Study
Opportunities to assess the human component are necessary for developing an understanding of how individuals are affected by and affect the school structure. Thus, while Part I will offer insights into the school system, Part II will offer insights into the human interactions between all classroom participants. The teachers and students will be shadowed and interviewed. For example, shadowing a teacher during the school day will provide valuable information about the daily routine, the degree of interaction he or she may have with other teachers, and any other side conversations. We will also determine the amount of planning and preparation time the teacher has during the school day. This will help us to detect important patterns and routines. A basic understanding of the teacher to teacher interaction and the teacher to student interaction over the duration of a trimester will give us a preliminary sense of the degree of the learning problem.
The teachers will also be interviewed extensively to gain a sense of the types of interdisciplinary learning currently taking place. A questionnaire will be developed that gauges the extent of collaboration, time allocation, knowledge and understanding of other practices in the school by curricula and pedagogy.
Example questions:
(1)What are the learning goals for your students?
(2)Describe how you allocate your time during the school day and week.
(3)What do you know and understand about the academic practices of other teachers?
The last section of the Participant-Observation Study includes interviewing and testing students. We will examine how the students interact with each other and how they interact with teachers. We need to find out how much the students already know and if they make connections among subjects, and how much students learn from the current curriculum and the class structure. That is, what is the degree of the learning problem?
Part III: Classroom Observation Study
The last part of this investigation involves classroom observations using videotape over the course of one trimester. In terms of the physical component, we will examine the structure of the classroom. For example, we will make observations about the layout of the student workspaces, the framework for learning (how the class begins and ends), the number of students in each class, and the teaching methods, including the role of the teacher in the learning process. The classroom layout plays a significant role in collaboration and teamwork.
Upon completion of all these parts, we will assess the best learning practices that are used to promote interdisciplinary learning between subjects, make clear recommendations, and encourage change.
References
Applying Theory Bellamy, RKE. 1996. “Designing educational technology: Computer-mediated change.” p.123-146 in Bonnie Nardi (ed.) Context and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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