Because our brains are wired to seek connections[20], because we want our students to see that the world is interconnected and interdependent; we attempt, where possible and appropriate, to teach standards in an integrated fashion. The National Middle Schools Association also believes that curriculum integration is important in middle school education. Their position paper located on their website[21] believes that curriculum integration
“offer a correspondingly wide range of benefits for students and the potential to vitalize the tenets of middle level education philosophy, as presented both by NMSA (This We Believe) and the Carnegie Corporation (Turning Points 2000). These benefits include and exceed national, state, and local standards.”
“This philosophy - backed by significant research into neurological function, learning theory, social development, and curriculum design - underscores the importance of four types of relationships that affect how young adolescents learn:
- relationships between the learner and the content.
- relationships between the learner and the teacher.
- relationships among the learners.
- and relationships within the content itself.”
The River School chose to integrate social studies and science because these content core classes can be presented in a way to show that the natural world and the social world is connected. The use of overaching questions for each grade act as an umbrella for the intersection of science and social studies standards[22]:
Within each of these questions, units are designed around other questions. For instance, for the question, “What is our relationship with the Earth?” a unit is designed with the question, “How do rivers affect culture and how do cultures affect rivers?,” appropriately blending life sciences and world history. Another example is the unit, “What evidence do you have that technology (applied science) shaped culture through the ages and culture shaped technology?,” which blends physical science and world history.
At the end of the large units, students are given an opportunity to apply their knowledge of the standards through a project assessment, rather than just testing Teachers attempt to create projects that have these attributes:
Projects teach a variety of higher level thinking skills because students are not regurgitating facts for a test. They have to apply that learning in some other context like creating a newspaper or a web page with the knowledge learned. They also learn organizational skills about breaking down a project into smaller tasks, setting a schedule for getting the tasks done. Teachers guide students by structuring more of the tasks in 6th grade and in 7th and 8th grades setting deadlines but allowing more choices for students in completing the tasks.
Every year teachers teach students about the art of asking questions. They learn the attributes of a good questions and create a check list of these attributes. One year, the students created the following list of attributes:
Learning how to ask good questions helps students in several ways:
Teachers are given team time to plan these integrated units. In this way they are modeling the collaboration that we want our students to learn and value. Teachers have the flexibility of teaching social studies and science a single period each day or a block period every other day depending on the needs of the lesson.
If we want our students to learn how to think critically which is a necessary requirement of an educated citizenry, then learning standards to take a test will not suffice. They have to be able to use that knowledge to solve a problem. Curriculum integration using questions to tie standards together and use of projects as end of unit assessments offer the most opportunity for students to gain critical thinking skills.
The skill areas of math and language arts are taught back to back. This allows students early in the year to be able to change math classes to fit their individual needs and levels of competency, without affecting the rest of their schedule, especially in social studies and science, where students are heterogeneously grouped. We use the CPM or College Preparatory Math because it emphasizes conceptual understanding as opposed to algorithmic memorization. It also spirals the concepts throughout the year and throughout the three year program so that students are reinforced through subsequent lessons.
Because the CPM is challenging, we offer after school math tutoring twice a week led by the math teacher.
In the Language Arts classes, students gain proficiency through weekly Lit Logs, spelling and vocabulary, writing conventions, and writing assignments. Literary analysis develops critical thinking and self reflection. Reading is encouraged throughout the school with 20 minutes of daily silent sustained reading. Since it was instituted 5 years ago, students’ reading comprehension skills have increased.
The electives of music, drama, and the visual arts fulfill the creative need that is a part of human nature. They also play an important role in achieving the goals of our school. When students get to express themselves creatively through the arts, they gain confidence in themselves. They find that they have something of themselves to contribute through a performance or through a work of art.
Sixth graders take either band or a wheel of one trimester of drama, art, and chorus. In seventh and eighth grades, students choose to continue in band for the year or take a year of drama, strings, or visual arts. In the early years of the River School we had a variety of creative courses that would change every six weeks. What we discovered is that students did not develop proficiency, didn’t develop a commitment to any of the arts. To become proficient takes time and practice. Since we developed our current offerings, our students have become skilled in their art choice and often continue on in high school and beyond.
In music, we offer band, strings, chorus and musicals. Students learn proficiency in playing an instrument, they learn to read music, and they learn how to work together to perform in ensembles or as a whole band or group. They gain confidence when performing before an audience.
In the visual arts, our goal is not just the skills of painting or sculpting or drawing. Even more important than the acquisition of these skills is the creative process, the critical thinking that is involved in the content. Much of each project involves problem solving, critical thinking of a higher order, and lots of self-reflection as many of the “subjects” for the art project are the students themselves. In the process, they learn more about who they are as they grapple with the existential and sociological questions that are important to them. A ninth grader returned from high school to report that she noticed that River School students seem to discuss issues at a deeper, less superficial level than other students. Projects are evaluated by the class using rubrics and are done in a way that is respectful and meaningful.
In drama, it is less about the play and more about the process of knowing oneself, knowing human motivation to play a part. Through improvisation and journal writing, students are led to understand human behavior and then to understand themselves. The high level of respect for each other demanded by the teacher makes the class safe for students to look at themselves, to make mistakes without the fear of teasing from their peers.
The elective program is a vital part of our ability to reach our goals of students becoming responsible, respectful, resourceful, and responsive. When a strong sense of self is formed, when students have been supported in exploring who they are through the arts; they are more confident, more caring of others, and less needing to draw attention to themselves in unproductive ways.
This is a systems approach creating a school where all the elements in the school’s culture – explicit and implicit – are aligned to our theory and philosophy that is the root of our success in empowering students. When we empower student appropriately, giving them a voice while holding them accountable for their choices, achieving a school’s mission is a lot easier because we’re using the students as an important, often untapped, resource in a school. And when all of the participants – teachers, parents, and students – are learners and open to possibilities; then amazing results can occur.
As Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline said:
System thinking makes understandable the subtlest aspects of the learning organization – the new way individuals perceive themselves and their world. At the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind – from seeing ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as caused by someone or something “out there” to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience. A learning organization is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality. And how they can change it.[23]
By paying attention to the context, we create an environment in which our students become strong individuals who flourish and learn as conscious, responsible human beings, necessary for the maintenance of a healthy democratic society.