My Introduction to Integrated Learning

I started my college career at Miami University.  As part of my architecture major, I was enrolled in Miami’s Western College Program, an interdisciplinary program.  This is where I was first introduced to the idea of integrated curriculum.  Two classes in particular stand out for me.  One was an integrated sciences class on the topic of energy production.  We looked at different facets of energy from the perspectives of many science disciplines, including thermodynamics, physics, biochemistry, and environmental sciences.  By considering these various views, I learned that energy is a complex topic that isn’t limited to one discipline or area of study.  To understand energy production, I must know how fossil fuels are converted into heat, the way that nuclear fusion works, the different methods for producing electricity, how solar cells convert sunlight into electric energy, and the impact on the environment of any of these forms of energy.  Another class on integrated humanities also emphasized how real-world situations cannot be limited to a single discipline.  In that class, we looked at many aspects of the 1920s, from the emergence of jazz to the political climate of the time.  In both of these classes, we were able to take a much broader look at a particular topic by integrating multiple disciplines.  This was the first time that I had been able to learn about a subject in such a rich and full way.  It emphasized that fact that real-life situations do not limit themselves to one particular area of study, but rather take a multi-faceted approach to truly understand.
 

​The Realities of Teaching
At the end of my first year, I changed my major to elementary education and during the rest of my undergraduate years, I took all the typical education classes.  Although none of them specifically advocated an integrated approach to science or social studies, I was still very interested in how to provide elementary students with the kind of experience I had had in my first year of college, where different realms of knowledge can come together to help create a wider picture of a topic of study. 
 

Then, I graduated.  I got my first teaching job, and found myself overwhelmed with the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a classroom full of real students.  Like most beginning teachers, I longed to apply everything I had learned in my teacher preparation program, but was faced with the reality of a limited amount of time.  Everything seemed to take longer than expected.  As I became more experienced with managing the work load, I began to include connections between subject areas wherever I could, but not to the extent that I had experienced in my college courses.  Other teaching ideas that I encountered in various professional development programs took center stage as I saw the value of the new ideas.  I learned about the nature of understanding, how essential questions can help students organize their learning on a topic, how to assess early reading skills, how to use formative assessments to guide my instruction, and to inform students on their own progress.  But still, through the years, the idea of integration was still there, in the back of my mind, and found expression when today’s writing lesson connected to yesterday’s science, or when we used reading and writing to further our understanding of changes in communities over time.
 

​First Hints of Revival
In the fall of 2011, I started my master’s degree with Michigan State’s online Master of Arts in Education program.  One of my first classes was TE 848, Writing Assessment and Instruction with Anne Heitz.  Early in this course, we examined an article by the National Commission on Writing called The Neglected “R.”  This article discussed the need for better writing instruction in our schools.  One recommendation was to provide more time for writing, at least doubling the amount of time students spend writing in school.  They suggested that this could be done by integrating writing into other areas of the curriculum.  This idea caught my interest and brought my attention back to that long-forgotten idea of integrating subject matter.  This concept of integration was also present when we looked at the different ways to think about writing genres.  Like most teachers, I had thought of genres in the traditional way – narrative, expository, persuasive, and so on.   Articles by Ken Hyland and Charles R. Cooper helped me to consider genres in a different way.  Rather than organizing genres by type, Hyland and Cooper both arranged them by function.  Hyland grouped genres according to a theme, such as work or technology, or around types of writing used in a particular profession.  Cooper defines genres in a more social ways – writing produced in a cultural or social setting.  We might learn about different ways to communicate, compare those formats, and discuss when they are most appropriate.  Thinking about writing genres in these ways started to open up some exciting possibilities for me.  Rather than teaching writing as a separate subject, I began to think about the types of writing that would be associated with various topics that I teach.  For example, in science, students might be expected to write lab reports after an experiment, or they might write a report or essay explaining what they have learned about a particular topic.  I saw the importance of teaching students these “academic” genres that we sometimes assume that they already know.  My major project for this course became a series of lessons to teach students how to use writing to explain their thinking in math.  We examined the purpose and audience of this type of writing.  Why do we explain our thinking?  Who is it for?  We analyzed some samples of this type of writing.  As a class, we developed a rubric for what makes a good example of explaining our thinking, and then we practiced together, with partners, and eventually, on their own.  As a result, my students were much better prepared to explain their thinking in math, and I reaffirmed the value of integrating two very different subjects – writing and math.
 

During the next semester, I again had a course that allowed me to dabble in the idea of integrating subject areas.  In TE861a, Teaching Science for Understanding with Bill Struck, we looked at the idea of understanding in science, as well as how to assess for understanding.  As our teaching assignment, we were asked to design a series of lessons that focused on building students’ understanding of a science topic.  I created a sequence of lessons on classifying animals by their body structures.  In this lesson, I was able to integrate reading as a way to gain information about the topic.  Students began by doing a hands-on sort of pictures of animals.  I assessed their understanding of classifying animals by observing the ways they sorted the animals.  Then I used the text to introduce the idea of sorting them by their body structures.  Because we had discussed possible misconceptions in my course, I anticipated that my students would not understand that invertebrates were animals, and this proved to be true.  I used another text that discussed some different types of invertebrates.  This follow-up lesson also included some reading comprehension instruction.  In this way, I was able to experiment again with integrating two subject areas into a single set of lessons.
 

​A New Kind of Standard
During the same academic year, my school was beginning to dig into the new Common Core standards.  As we looked deeply at the Language Arts standards and compared them to our current standards, my grade-level team and I discovered a much larger emphasis on nonfiction text.  We found that the standards called for a balance of fiction and nonfiction texts in reading instruction.  This posed a resource problem for us.  Our reading series was almost completely fiction.  It included only five nonfiction texts for the whole year, and all five were narrative nonfiction.  There were no informational texts at all.  We began to discuss where we could find more informational text that we could use for reading instruction.  Unfortunately, our district did not have any money for purchasing new resources, so we had to do it with the materials we had on hand.  We considered the possibility of using nonfiction books from the school library, but we did not have multiple copies of nonfiction texts in the library, or even enough texts on similar topics for an entire class.  After much discussion, at the very end of the school year, we finally realized that we did have a source of informational text with multiple copies – our science and social studies textbooks!  Because we all tended to think of the subjects independently, it had not occurred to us that we might be able to use these texts in reading instruction.  I took this idea into my summer classes.
 

​It Starts to Come Together
In TE 842, Reading Assessment and Instruction with Annie Whitlock, I came across the information I needed to make integration happen in my classroom.  One of our key texts in this course was Comprehension & Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action by Stephanie Harvey and Harvey Daniels.  This book discussed the importance of inquiry in student learning, in all subject areas, and the role of reading comprehension in inquiry.  More importantly, it provided actual guidance in how to do that in a real classroom, with real students, and real content standards that must be met.  In all of the classroom examples, students were using reading and writing skills to investigate a variety of topics in science and social studies.  These suggestions gave me the first ideas of how to make this kind of integration work in an elementary classroom.  The second book that turned out to be important for me was Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction: Engaging Classrooms, Lifelong Learners by Emily Anderson Swan.  This was not an assigned text for the class, but several of our readings referenced Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) as an example of how to teach reading comprehension and I felt that it would be another good reference for building my integrated units. 
 

As part of this course, we were asked to do our own project on reading instruction.  My project focused on the benefits of integrating instruction, as well as developing a unit of integrated reading and social studies.  I read the research on several integrated projects, including CORI and others.  I was surprised and excited to learn that using these frameworks can raise students’ reading achievement by up to half a year and their content-area knowledge by a year or more!  I used this data to write a letter to my administrators to explain the benefits of this approach.  I also created a unit on communities for my grade-level team to use to begin the year, and also as a model for future units.
 

​The Idea Comes to Life
After sharing my research with my teammates and my administrators, we all agreed to try this new approach.  As a result, I have created several new integrated units during this current school year.  We have all found that our students understand the content area materials much better than in past years.  It is more difficult to compare reading gains, as this is our first year using the new Common Core standards.  Hopefully, we will see improved results on this year’s state reading test, but that won’t be known until this summer.
 

In the meantime, I have continued to pursue this idea of integrating content in my courses.  In the fall of 2012, I took two courses that allowed me to create integrated lessons.  In TE855, Teaching School Mathematics, I was able to do an action research project on the effects of using a framework on students’ problem-solving skills.  This framework was essentially a reading comprehension strategy for word problems.  Teaching students a way to understand and think about math problems did increase their accuracy as well as their persistence in solving it with an answer that makes sense.
 

During the fall semester, I also took TE861B, Inquiry and the Nature of Science.  Dr. Amelia Gotwals, my instructor, was willing to allow me to pursue my interest in integrating science and language arts, and I was able to create an inquiry-based unit on soil that also included reading comprehension instruction.  This lesson sequence was a great success with my students.  In the corner of our sidewalk at school, there is a bare patch of soil where the grass won’t grow.  We investigated why this was happening.  Integrating the reading instruction with the inquiry lessons greatly increased my students’ motivation to read and learn about soil.  My students learned a great deal about the various properties of soil, and they seem to have retained it much longer than students in previous years.  This success makes me very excited to extend this type of teaching into other units of instruction!
 

My early experiences with integrated curriculum in my undergraduate classes, as well as recent research into the positive benefits of this kind of learning, have convinced me that this is way I need to move in my teaching.  When I finish my degree this spring, I will have the time and the training that I need to make my teaching even more effective.  I am looking forward to developing well-thought-out integrated units for Ohio’s new science and social studies standards, as well as incorporating more reading and writing instruction in mathematics.  I feel that my courses in my master’s degree, as well as other training and experiences I have had over the years, have prepared me to change to a style of teaching that I wouldn’t have been able to manage several years ago.