Action Overview: Interdisciplinary Connections

Staff identify universal concepts and specific connections across the standards of other content areas.

This set of resources is designed to help educators identify universal concepts and specific connections across the standards of other content areas. With this action, teams of educators and other instruction-related staff examine the standards and benchmarks to identify important concepts and skills that cross content areas. Teams could include educators and leaders from a variety of disciplines and programs within a site. They look for opportunities for curriculum and instruction in each content area to contribute to student learning of those ideas and abilities. Doing this work opens the discussion to

Introduction

What are the benefits of exploring universal concepts and connections across the standards of content areas?

Doing the work of alignment across content areas can provide many benefits to teaching and learning, including:

What are some examples of this work?

Example 1: A grade level team observes that the use of evidence is a practice that is shared among language arts, social studies, science, math and the arts. They discuss ways the use of evidence is similar and different in each content area. They think ahead toward how that practice could influence their future curriculum writing and the way they use evidence in instruction.

Example 2: As a result of discussions between English Language Arts (ELA) and science teachers, a couple biology teachers who have students do an experiment with termites decide to introduce a magazine article on termite behaviors. They teach the students how to analyze the validity of the evidence in the text by identifying the type of publication, the author’s credibility and biases, and the style of writing (academic vs recreational). This evidence is used by the students to explain the behaviors they observed in their termite investigation.

Suggested Activity

How do educators use Portal resources to identify universal concepts and specific connections across the standards of other content areas?

Related Content

For more information about the role and purpose of standards, visit Develop a shared understanding of a standards-based education system.

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