Making middle schools great: The essentials of interdisciplinary curriculum integration

Abstract

The essential questions for this paper are as follows: Why do we integrate curriculum in middle school? How do we integrate curriculum in middle school? The middle school is the important bridge between the elementary and high school worlds. One primary teacher who is responsible for teaching all of the content areas in primary school. But in high school, each teacher is responsible for one content area. So, in the middle level, teachers should be working on teams of 2 to 4 people, and that team should be responsible for all of the content areas. And they should be looking for relevance between student's life and the curriculum. There are two types of curriculum integration planning. The first one is Interdisciplinary Unit planning, and the other is Curriculum Integration. Interdisciplinary Unit planning begins with organizing the different content areas. A theme is then chosen, and each content area decides how it can contribute to the theme. In Curriculum Integration, planning begins with a central theme, and then big ideas and concepts related to the theme are identified. Finally, activities are chosen to explore those ideas and concepts.