Brown Session (1) The Integrated Curriculum with Dennis Yuzenas

Session 1
Cooperative Teaching & Learning

script

Cooperative Teaching & Learning

Some people call this "the integrated curriculum"

One teacher, all subjects.

Some schools ask two teachers to share the subjects, such as Math, Science and History (Social Studies).

the second teacher covers Writing, Foreign Language and Literature.

The advantages are more time spent with the students.

Traditional schools ask a MATH teacher to teach 5 or 6 classes of 25 students in each class.  That's 125 or 150 students per week.

With Cooperative Teaching, the 6 classes are shared.  

A teacher meets with Group A of 25 students in the morning and Group B in the afternoon.

Instead of 150 students, the teacher meets with 50 students each week.

The reading from Big Picture:  page 29

Many people talk about how difficult it is to implement an integrated curriculum, which is taking the standard subject areas and combining them. That is ridiculous. The world is integrated! What is difficult is what schools do every day: unravel the world and all its vast knowledge and put it into boxes called subjects and separate things that are not separate in the real world. What is science without math? What is his- tory without language? What are languages without their history? I first started messing with the 45-minute periods schedule in the early ’70s. I knew then that I was fighting a century-old addiction to teaching kids about the real world by locking them up in a building that looks, acts, and feels nothing like the real world. When we talk about reform, we should not be talking about tweaking the scheduling and modifying the curriculum, but about completely overhauling the entire structure of schools as we have known them for way too long.

No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.

~ Turkish proverb

Do most people even know how we got into this mess? In 1892, the National Education Association’s (NEA) National Council formed the “Committee of 10.” The president of Harvard University was the chair, and the other nine members were equally intellectual types from the elite institutions of the time. This tiny group set out to standardize high school programs on a national scale. They proclaimed exactly what subjects students should be taught, in what order, and even originated the concept of tracking, including stating that secondary education was only appro- priate for a small portion of youth. (You can bet their own kids were included in that small portion.)

For Discussion

1.  What advantages would there be to you if you could teach two classes instead of six classes per week?

2.  What changes in procedures would you need to implement if you integrated several subjects?

3.  Choose three subjects.  Describe a project that uses all three of the subjects.