Imagine being at a party where the food, the drinks, the music, and the room to mingle were each in a separate location. You probably wouldn’t really appreciate any of the individual parts as much if you had to keep switching gears from one to the other. Having everything together creates a more enjoyable experience.
Integrating subjects has a similar effect in classrooms. When we were students, school seemed so departmentalized, each subject taught in isolation from the others. As we innovate our teaching, we look to our experiences as adults and think about how we can help our students to see the world through many lenses and use a variety of skills to interpret a situation.
When academic content is integrated, students explore a concept or skill repeatedly through the day in different ways and through various lenses, allowing for broader application of the individual skills and a greater conceptual understanding of the world.
Once you start blurring the lines and teaching to the conceptual understanding rather than compartmentalizing reading and writing, the questions often become, How do I incorporate the individual subject skills required to reach that understanding? Where does reading fluency, envisioning, sentence structure, etc., live in the integrated curriculum? It means taking a step back and looking at the big picture, thinking about your year, your students, and purpose, and then rolling up your sleeves and digging in. It might get messy; you might be uncomfortable. But don’t worry, the skills are embedded and purposefully taught within the genre. If you have the flexibility to design your scope, sequence, and units, you are ready to dive in.
What if my year is preplanned? Well, here you’ll need to gather all of the small pieces, or skills, and create the Big Idea from them. For example, if your sequence calls for teaching quotation marks and the proper placement of the comma, you can build a narrative unit around those skills and look deeply at reading and writing literature that is full of dialogue. As the students repeatedly encounter dialogue and use it in authentic situations, they will build more mastery.
When integration is done well, you will enhance your students’ conceptual understanding of real-life topics while still teaching reading and writing skills. It sounds hard, but there are many resources out there. You can begin with Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe; Thinking Through Genre by Heather Lattimer; and The Reading Strategies Book and The Writing Strategies Book, both by Jennifer Serravallo.
Bonnie Greenwald, a literacy liaison and learning specialist, works with teachers to guide their practice and create and modify curricula in order to optimize learning for a range of students through a developmentally appropriate, integrated curriculum.
Anacarla Schelino, a lead teacher and literacy specialist, has worked at The School at Columbia University since 2005. Throughout her 20 years of teaching in public, charter, and independent schools, she has supported teachers’ and students’ learning of project-based curriculum that integrates a variety of disciplines.
Bonnie Greenwald and Anacarla Schelino will present a workshop titled “Reading and Writing in the Integrated Classroom” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.