E A R T H S I D E
USEFUL TEACHING IDEAS FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS
Integrated Learning: Putting it all Together
Yes, it takes time and effort to teach in an integrated way, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Integrated teaching is like putting mirrors up. Lessons reinforce and recapitulate each other, within and across traditional subject boundaries (Horizontal Integration), and through the years (Vertical Integration). The chance that particular lessons or experiences will be missed or lost is reduced. It is efficient teaching, and also very real. In real life, subjects are not separated in space and time, but form a whole.
As things stand in most primary schools, each year is a sort of island. Often, the content studied each year is not chosen so as to relate to content studied previously. This is an unfortunate situation, and there are a number of reasons for it. Significantly, in most schools, teachers are only with their class for one year. Continuation and recapitulation from year to year is made difficult by different styles and interests, and by limited communications.
In education, the ability to return to material after a number of years and to study it at a deeper level is a real gift. Even as adults we know that we sometimes need to come back to a written work after many years, in order to truly appreciate it. Sometimes we just find things when we are not yet ready for them.
For example, there are many stories, poems and songs that can be enjoyed immensely, but by no means understood in any analytic sense, by very young children. If these children, when older, have had the advantage of enjoying the work at an earlier stage of their education, then their later experience is so much richer. They will have loved the work, and been at one with it, long before they have ‘taken it apart’. They will have known it both ways.
This Vertical Integration is not difficult to achieve if the school’s organisational structures support it. One way is to allow teachers to take classes for more than one year, either consecutively or otherwise.
Horizontal Integration can be enhanced through the recognition by teachers that language and other skills are not developed in isolation, but are interwoven with skills in what have generally been regarded (in modern times) as discreet subject areas. In teaching the whole person it is well to recognise that there are no truly discreet subject areas.
We educate so as to allow children to make connections. Let’s make a more connected curriculum for them.
Earthside Education
http://www.earthsideeducation.com/
earthside.education[at]westnet.com.au
(+61) 0449 025167
ES002© Sean David Burke 2010. Free to Copy as is.
Sean is the author of Lighting the Literacy Fire: Creative Ideas for Teachers and Parents
Earthside Blog Index
1. Get a Grip: Starting the Day with a Handshake
3. Teach Something Meaningless
5. The Teacher as a Sower of Seeds
8. A Succession of Memorable Experiences
9. Writing Verses for Your Class
