Students who struggle with reading comprehension in middle school often lack the academic vocabulary the need to understand grade-level textbooks and other instructional materials. Research shows that to learn a new word well, students need to encounter and use it multiple times in different contexts. The authors describe Word Generation, a…

Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

Describes the Jefferson County Primary Integrated Curriculum program. Developed as an interdisciplinary curriculum, the program allows primary students to work holistically. The article includes Learning Units. (MD)

Career Education in its broadest sense could be the study of technology, or analysis of the ways in which a social group provides for its material needs. (Author)

Author describes a design which seeks to formulate curriculum into discrete but interactive spheres. (Author/CB)

The reasons for, history of, and present standing of interdisciplinary education are discussed. Finally, implications and recommendations are set forth. (Author/MLF)

To develop an interdisciplinary curriculum, a district needs a field-tested action plan. This curriculum mapping plan's four phases--conducting internal and external action research, developing a proposal, implementing and monitoring a pilot unit, and adopting the program--can be accomplished over a three-year period. Procedures are described in…

A fuller development of imagination can bring the curriculum into a coherent, cohesive whole. (Author/MLF)

The editor of ASCD's "Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation," Heidi Hayes Jacobs, has worked with hundreds of schools to discover best curriculum planning practices. She finds doing too much at once and forcing subject overlaps the biggest obstacles to interdisciplinary curriculum planning. Moving to standardized…

Multidisciplinary thinking is advocated as a necessary approach to curriculum development in the light of the emergence of a global society, the rate of social change, the information explosion, and new theories about reality. (GW)

The nature of the work for which we educate students is changing. Outlines how schools must help students process knowledge in a rapidly changing world. Schools must incorporate interdisciplinary approaches that teach breadth, values, and a global perspective. (MD)

Rejects Matthew Gandal's characteristics of good standards (in the March 1995 "Educational Leadership") as overwhelmingly "educentric." Content standards that define what it means to be a good student within the traditional system will not prepare students for the rapidly changing future. Interdisciplinarity, competence, and authentic context are…

Teachers in Fort Howard, Maryland, adopted a planning wheel to keep teachers' content area central and allow integration of logical, natural elements of associated course content. The planning wheel has become a useful organizer for curriculum development, individual teacher planning, and team planning across daily lessons or at the unit level.…

The use of sensory-motor approach of learning develops a long-term effect on young minds for future learning. The valuable ways of teaching students with projects that are multidisciplinary, thought provoking and emotionally involving are described.