Curriculum integration is a hallmark of middle level education. This approach to education involves blending topics across content areas as a way of studying topics and problems of interest to young adolescents. Approaches to curriculum integration and interdisciplinary curriculum overlap with concepts like democratic education, place-based…

The Whole School Success Partnership (TWSSP) worked to develop practices and cultures that emphasized student success in five middle and high schools. Because this project took place in secondary schools where teachers have disciplinary specializations, the whole school approach came with unique opportunities and challenges. Here we describe how…

Purpose: The purpose of this directory was to identify, describe, and evaluate evidence that the education practices improve academic performance, close the achievement gap, and improve persistence towards graduation for low-income, first-generation, and historically-underrepresented 6th grade through college students. Method: The sample for the…

Describes a field-tested interdisciplinary unit activity that involves collecting data on honeybees. Students gain hands-on experience with collecting, transforming, and analyzing data in this activity by using actual techniques employed by entomologists, the scientists who study insects. (ASK)

In the quest to make learning more meaningful for middle schoolers, some teaching teams are finding a natural alternative to contrived thematic units: curriculum integrated around science. Examples include quadrat study of a pond, smoke-free studies, and the nervous system. (MKR)

The article presents activities that tap into elementary and middle school children's multiple ways of knowing by having them visually express impressions and thoughts about music, and conversely, express their impressions of visual art by creating music. Because most children learn through both visual and auditory senses, they may foster deeper…

Integrated mathematics and science teaching and learning is a widely advocated yet largely unexplored phenomenon. This study involves an examination of middle school integrated mathematics and science education from two perspectives: in theory and in practice. The theoretical component of this research addresses the ill-defined nature of the…

Describes the role of integrative curriculum reform in fostering multicultural education in Brown Barge Middle School, in Pensacola, Florida. Examines the efforts of one team of teachers to create a multicultural curriculum, noting factors in their success. (JPB)

This study presents a detailed description and an interpretation of efforts made to prepare prospective upper elementary/middle level teachers to make connections between science and mathematics. The focus of this study is placed on the undergraduate teacher candidates' senior year in which they take science methods in the fall and participate in…

Describes a middle school mathematics project that incorporated the adult mathematics concepts of school finance. Discusses the lesson plans; the goal of teaching students to make, use, and understand frequency tables; and teacher notes on the use of a relevant, complex problem context. (JPB)

Discusses intellectual, practical, and accountability problems of the integrated curriculum model. Notes the need for improving basic classroom instruction before reform. Argues for the potential of the basic theory of curriculum integration. (JPB)

Relates stories of three middle and high school teachers to describe how teachers can effectively integrate young adult literature into the curriculum. Notes a variety of strategies, including the particularly effective use of multiple genre thematic units, where a variety of texts are linked by some common theme, allowing students to use…

A teacher wants to help her middle school students who already hate poetry to appreciate William Carlos Williams' poem "This Is Just to Say," but her approach is ill-focused. In frustration, she assigns her students a punitive writing assignment. An approach that might have resulted in a better outcome could be achieved. It would have…

Examines literary discourse that occurred in a sixth-grade language arts classroom within a departmentalized, multidisciplinary, and then an interdisciplinary, context. Identifies discourse elements. Organizes elements into the following broad themes: (1) the text and the story world; (2) the reader and the story world; and (3) discipline…

Relates the personal story of how a 13-year-old used previous knowledge of matching words in English to construct her own understanding of mapping in mathematics as it pertains to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) recommendation that students use and value connections between mathematics and other disciplines. (AIM)