News Brief

03/13/13

In Common Core, Teachers See Interdisciplinary Opportunities

Education Week (03/13/13) Heitin, LianaTeachers increasingly are turning to interdisciplinary thematic units as they implement the Common Core State Standards in English language arts. The standards require students beginning in fifth grade to read more nonfiction than fiction, but the required percentages for nonfiction "reflect the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings." The standards also pave the way for cross-curricular projects by outlining specific literacy requirements for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects and stressing research and synthesizing skills. Many language arts instructors believe pairing fiction and nonfiction under a specific theme is more effective in getting children to more deeply engage with and analyze texts. For instance, rather than teach "To Kill a Mockingbird," a teacher could teach the concept of courage using "To Kill a Mockingbird," a PBS Frontline piece, a speech, and an article. "Putting those texts together in a bundle helps us to work toward conceptual understanding," says Sarah Brown Wessling, a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa, and the 2010 National Teacher of the Year. "That's the spirit of the core." Educators stress that theme-based interdisciplinary units mirror the learning through reading that students will do as adults, whether learning about politics by reading the newspaper or about gardening by reading magazine articles. "Maybe this also is what the common core is trying to get us to realize-that these boundaries between disciplines are false," says Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance program teaching and learning specialist Emily Chiariello.
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