A Philosophy of Mid-Level Education and Interdisciplinary Teaming

A Philosophy Of Mid-Level Education and Interdisciplinary Teaming

Interdisciplinary teaming is more than an organizational tactic aimed to efficiently group students. It is a systematic belief where the developmental and educational needs of early adolescents are met by providing a community of learning. Typically, teams are students surrounding a core of teachers they all share. These teachers have common planning time where they can focus on developing their curriculum and stay abreast of individual behavioral and academic issues.

While working in the Fayetteville School District, interdisciplary teams were utilized much like Capelluti & Brazee advocate. Approximately 120 students shared four core teachers (math, language arts, science and social studies) who in-turn met each day for an hour of planning. The students travelled with the same 20-25 peers from class to class creating a social-emotional comfort zone for developmentally volitale early adolescents.

The school building itself supported this team construct. The four classrooms were laid out in a horseshoe around a pair of common meeting areas. One, a mini-computer lab with 12 PCs and, another, a larger team space for morning meetings, Student Council speeches and other team-wide events for video viewing, counselor meetings, guest speakers, etc.

Where Fayetteville failed, at least in the eyes of this article, is in the concept of curriculum integration. While there were discussions in the daily team meetings about where each teacher was in their curriculum, there was little cross-curricular planning. The science teacher stayed true to her curriculum. As did the math, ELA and social studies teachers.

After all, there were standards to be met and frameworks to teach.

It is not that they didn’t try, though. I remember a unit culminating around a field trip to the Tulsa zoo. In science, students studied animal taxonomy and natural selection. In math, the curriculum was steered toward statistics, sometimes touching on the “Golden Ratio” (a proportional ratio often seen in nature.) In language arts, students wrote haikus and narrative stories with animals as the main character and social studies looked at endangered species and the economic value of having a zoo in a community. While this is not the comprehensive curriculum progressive educational minds like James Beane or Paul DeHart Hurd preach or that King Middle School in Portland, Maine execute, it is a start. And, at the end of the day, the kind of integrated curriculum this article and these entities promote, is not easy. It doesn’t happen over night. It takes a team of teachers with an open mind and a willingness to test themselves and their teaching philosophy to step outside of their proverbial “comfort zone.”

Capelluti & Brazee  pose an important question: “Will prospective and veteran teachers be better prepared to work as members of multifaceted middle school teams in the future?”

They quickly answer, yes, with the caveat that new and veteran teachers are educated to do so. I disagree. Education is part content, part motivation and part willingness to act. A teacher can have all the professional development in the world – currently it is required that teachers in Arkansas have 60 hours of professional development in various content and social awareness areas. But without the intrinsic motivation to change, without accepting the four-pronged approach of teaching early adolescents (physical, social, emotional and intellectual), a new-age of progress, curriculum and instruction as expressed in this article and various other hopeful sources, will not be realized.

What is that hope?

It is the understanding that a strict curriculum of arbitrary standards is not the end-all-be-all dogma of education. It is the understanding that cooperation is more valuable than content. That the way we individually solve problems is more valuable than getting the right answer every time. Because in many instances, the right answer is not known, it may not perfect in the present time. We should ask our students to challenge the status quo. So, should we, as teachers, challenge the status quo.

The ideal middle school teacher, in my opinion, is not a savant of biology or the history of western civilization or algebra. The modern middle school teacher is a savant of humanity, of the prospects of youth. Through interdisciplinary teaming, the understanding that students at this certain age need consistency, cooperation, a guided goal by the adults who immediately surround them, a sense of community of peers and the open doors that safety provides, we as educators of early adolescents can begin to meet the challenges of this next generation. I advocate for teaming that not merely meets the organizational needs of a school, bu