Curriculum Integration :: Teaching Education Integration Essays

Curriculum IntegrationContrary to popular belief, curriculum consolidation entails more(prenominal) than simply linking lessons together along a common theme. It is more than just rearranging existing lesson plans, it is an attempt to organize curriculum around prodigious problems and issueswithout regard for field-area boundaries (Beane, 1997). The goal of curriculum integration is to have students gain a deeper level of understanding across subject areas through inter touch ond thematic study. Themes are drawn from life as it is being lived and experienced with noesis based around problem solving rather than rote readiness acquisition (Beane, 1997).Rather than seeing curriculum integration as this integrated and connected series of higher order thinking skills, many mess (including teachers) confuse integration with a multidisciplinary approach. Multidisciplinary attempts at teaching thematic units relate individual subjects to singular topic without making connections. For example, during a unit on fish, a teacher could have his or her students read literature just about fish and do fish word problems however, unless the connections of synthesis, analysis, and evaluation are made, unbowed integration is non being achieved. The students are learning a bang-up deal about fish, math, and literature separately, but are not advance to see the relationships in the midst of each of these subject areas. In order to service foster an understanding across curriculum areas, integration needs to commingle the subject matter in the students minds through making connections between subject areas and exploring how these relate to their e genuinelyday lives. Integration of content is important and potentially very effective because the brain processes information through connections. If teachers help their students create connections between subject-area material, and then they will potentially increase the amount of long-term companionship retained by th e students (Beane, 1997). Integration is also important due to the incident that there is a growing emphasis on application of knowledge rather than rote memorization and due to the fact that knowledge is not fixed (Beane, 1997). Integration allows students to look at things from different angles and to explore the canescent areas that may be a part of the various concepts.Evidence from both educational journals and personal interviews suggest several different possible approaches to prosperous science integration. Many of the lesson plans dealt with integrating science with technology or with mathematics. For example, a fifth-grade teacher had his class record weather observations for an entire year and then used their data to teach graphing concepts including bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, as rise as concepts such as mean and mode (Chia, 1998).