Interweaving Within a Subject

As midterms come to an end and marks start to come back, again I’m left with the question of how a mark measures what you’ve learned. Why is it that so many education marks, specifically ones dealing with math and science, deal with writing papers? Is there no better way to assess these classes and what we’re learning? This is something I often become frustrated with because even though I learn so much, keep up with the readings and always engage in class discussion, my marks suffer because my writing skills are not the greatest. As a Physics major, I am used to writing in a lab report format and this is usually not viewed as a very good way of writing by education profs and/or T.A’s. But how would we change this? How could you make a mark based on what the student has learned? Everyone learns differently and will have different perspectives. Who’s right or wrong? Will creating integrated curriculums between different departments such as English and science help this?

In order for an integrated curriculum to work, I think that teachers would have to be specialized in more than one or two subjects. How would someone like myself ever be able to teach history or English in a physics classroom when I haven’t looked at these subjects since high school? I would not feel comfortable teaching these subjects, especially at a high school level, where what they learn is so important for the future. This goes back to my previous blog about elementary school teachers teaching all subjects. I think it is important for the teacher to know their material well in order to teach concepts correctly and confidently. Without knowing subject matter well how would you be able to design creative lessons that engage students in higher-level thinking? So although I do think that integrated curriculum can be done sometimes, within certain subjects such as math and science, I don’t think it can be as broad as some people picture it because in order for that to happen teachers would need multiple degrees to be experts in multiple subjects.

For my current group project where we are creating a unit where we are integrating big ideas within one subject. Instead of integrating multiple subjects, we have decided to integrate different types of science from the grade 10 science curriculum into one unit. I think that this would be a great way for students to be able to make connections between different strands such as physics and chemistry. Keeping them separate could limit students from making these connections, because the reality is they are all connected and I don’t think should be so separated until the senior years, where specialization in sciences come into play. In general science classes these connections are important. So integrated curriculum inside one class I think is great and doable for all teachers and will also lead to students thinking in a higher-order because they are making these connections and applying their knowledge to different concepts.

from: http://cdnetr.a.cdnify.io/images/learning_science_in_the_21st_century.jpg