Collaborative Planning: Integrating Curriculum Across Subjects (Transcript)

Adam: Couple of little brief things. We have the agenda over there. Some things we wanted to bring up, and we only got half-an-hour, so do our best to use our time efficiently.

Brent: When teachers talk to each other, teachers learn from each other. There’s so many great ideas that our teachers come up with that engage kids, get kids to think outside of the box that I’m just amazed at what we can accomplish when we work together.

Brent: Individuals create great ideas, but really to move schools forward, I believe that everyone needs to be together and in dialoguing with each other, and creating a conversation about how to best serve students.

Adam: I feel really fortunate that at our school, we have grade level prep, which means that every day all of the sixth grade teachers are able to discuss various topics whether that be student concerns we have, or how to better integrate curriculum.

Adam: Here is what is– remains of the weather balloon. We’re really excited. This actually pretty much everything, minus the balloon itself.

Teachers: Oh! [laughter]

Teacher: That looks good.

Adam: Last year, an engineering teacher and myself thought it’d be really great to have a sort of science-engineering crossover project where we launched a high-altitude weather balloon way up into the stratosphere, with the intention of getting some unique data to help reinforce sixth grade topics of watershed studies and whatnot.

Students: Three, two, one, blast! [cheering]

Adam: And here is the tree it landed on somewhere in the Klickitat.

Student: Yeah.

Adam: It went somewhere in-between. And that’s what we’re going to try to show…

Student: Yeah.

Adam: …to everyone using this data that everyone’s pawing through.

Adam: I definitely had a pretty clear idea in mind of what I wanted to do upon retrieving our weather balloon, and it was great to bring the topic to the rest of the team to find out how we could connect it to language arts and other content areas.

Adam: Yesterday, we were able to make a crossover connection to math. I was having students actually looking through the data. And I was trying to rack my brain about how we might make more of a robust like language arts connection. That’s not my strength. I was wondering if you guys had any ideas.

Teacher: You could also do a really cool imagination piece with the travel of that, too.

Teacher: I agree the picture was traced on top of it would tell the story.

Teacher: But I think it’s a great way to bring in the scientific writing, too. I mean, you could do both. You could take them both at this time.

Teacher: You could do the same type of writing for both of them. One would be scientific writing. And one would be creative writing, and basically we’re inspired by one single experience, and how could you look at it from both perspectives?

Adam: That’d be cool!

Brent: You have to provide the structure for collaboration; that’s essential. You can’t have collaboration if teachers don’t have time to collaborate and so by tweaking a Master Schedule, you can provide opportunities for collaboration. That collaboration leads to great things.

Anne Marie: Because of that common prep time, it allows every team to plan field trips that allow them to figure out, “How do we related the curriculum within the different subject areas?”

Anne Marie: So we remember we went on a field trip. That was gathering data for helping the kids understand science based on where we live, and our unique geology in The Gorge.

Angie: When the science teachers decided to do this geology unit on land formations, we saw the opportunity as language arts teachers to bring the idea of the legends that explain these into reading and language arts so they could write a legend and then perform it.

Angie: Then they could choose to work alone or in partners, or in a group. And they’ve done skits an storybooks, and comic strips, and puppet shows, and iMovies.

Teacher: Awesome, are those recorded somewhere that we could watch, or are they…

Diesel: We took a trip, and it was meant to be for science, and then in this class, we’re writing like legends about Beacon Rock and Wahclella Falls, and like how Hood River Gorge came to be.

Anne Marie: The effect for the kids is they hear common messages. Rather than it being discreet classrooms and subjects and teachers and classes. They see it all relating together.

Adam: It is incredibly important to allow teachers to collaborate and work together. Not only to enrich the learning of all their students, but ourselves as professionals.

Schools That Work

Hood River Middle School