Week 31 Reflective Post: Interdisciplinary Connections

One side to this week's activity was to discuss the collaboration with different people and agencies. As a junior school teacher I have collaborated with staff, outside agencies for behaviour, public health nurses, specialist learning difficulties and speech language therapists, all in one term, as well as the collaboration that goes into planning and teaching in day to day classroom life. 


I know that different professionals are integral to having an interdisciplinary curriculum and I wanted to focus on my current teaching partners. I am currently the only single cell class in a collaborative school and so sometimes the physical walls do prevent collaboration in day to day life, as much as we try our hardest. We don't plan together unless it's a unit on science or sport, where most of the time we do a unit together but there's little discussion about it filtering into other curriculum areas, despite my designed planning format asking for those links to be recorded.

To work cohesively and create an interdisciplinary curriculum and staff, we need a range of expertise in the school and time to sit and each have ideas from our own strength areas to bring to the table. We can feed off each other and create a cohesive plan that implements as many cross overs as possible. In some schools the person with the passion and strength for science might be responsible for planning the science unit, whereas the person with the strength in social sciences will take the lead. But just because you have a strength for something, does that mean that another's expertise or perspective in that area isn't as good? The video from Ross school showed their faculties collaborating around one central topic that could be broadly accessed from any curriculum level and area - I think that whilst we are getting better in NZ at picking out things that can be used in this way, we are not yet broad enough. I think we might still be slightly trapped by a focus on a certain learning area each term and spanning out to find a topic that works, whereas we need to reverse it and take a broad topic and make links back to the curriculum areas instead.

 After watching this video, I have really opened my eyes further to the fact that our relationships between staff in our schools are now crucial to successful and effective teaching, because so many of us are now in MLE spaces and become even more interdisciplinary than ever in day to day teaching so that our kids get an interdisciplinary view of the world around them!

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