Teaming and Interdisciplinary Education at the Roslyn Middle School

From time to time, I ask some of the distinguished members of our administrative staff to write a guest column for this space. This week's column was written by Jack Palmadesso, principal of the Roslyn Middle School.

On a recent Thursday afternoon I had the opportunity to visit both a sixth-grade mathematics class and a sixth-grade English class. In the mathematics class, students were engaged in a lesson involving the type of geometric shapes seen in various Peruvian funeral masks. Across the hall, the English class was involved in a cooperative learning exercise in which students matched noteworthy works of art with student-generated written descriptions. Both classes comprised students on sixth-grade teams who would be visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they would see both the masks and the works of art. These two lessons demonstrated how diverse disciplines are effectively combined in an active learning environment.

Teaming and interdisciplinary instruction are two factors which make the Roslyn Middle School a unique learning experience for our sixth and seventh grade students. They are integral to our philosophy.

What is teaming? Interdisciplinary teaming is a way of organizing faculty and students so that a group of teachers share the same group of students and, in addition, share the responsibility for planning, teaching and evaluating the curriculum and instruction. This organizational structure creates an opportunity to meet the needs of sixth- and seventh-grade students, who are in transition from childhood to adolescence, by providing an expanded support system. It functions as a bridge from the traditional fifth-grade, non-departmentalized class to full departmentalization.

Teaming is an instructional organization in which teachers pool their resources, interests, expertise and knowledge of students and jointly take responsibility for meeting a significant part of the instructional needs of the same group of students. The benefits and features of teaming include:

* Offering support and aid to provide excellent instruction and classroom management.

* Giving students and teachers the feeling of belonging to a small group which has common goals and whose members are supportive of each other.

* Assigning a common group of students to a common group of teachers who share a common planning time.

* Maintaining the cohesiveness of the instructional program on a day-to-day basis. Academic departments assure consistency in the curriculum.

* Creating a productive classroom and school environment in which affective areas, such as interpersonal relations and responsibility, are addressed.

* Correlating subject matter, content and concepts through planned reinforcement.

* Providing the opportunity for faculty to share ideas, plans, student information and classroom observations.

Each team of 100-110 students consists of a guidance counselor and an English, social studies, math, science and special education teacher. The special education teacher serves as a co-teacher in our inclusion model. Each team has a common planning/meeting period each day.

The teachers on each team create an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum planning, addressing student concerns and meeting with every child's parents. Meetings of the teacher teams focus on curriculum and overall teaming concerns such as student needs, team activities, group projects and field trips.

The curriculum focus encourages opportunities for our students to see topics from an interdisciplinary perspective. When students are encouraged to explore a topic in this way, they see interactions among the fields of study and become aware of the multi-dimensional ways of perceiving a given person, place, object or event.

An additional advantage of teaming is in the area of communication. Team teachers communicate daily regarding the progress and concerns of their students. Parents are also an important and integral part of the team and the lines of communication between teachers and parents are always open. Team teachers communicate with parents through mid-quarter interim reports, quarterly report cards and telephone calls when necessary. Parent-teacher conferences are arranged for all students on the team, as well.

If parents have any questions or concerns about a specific academic area, they are encouraged to call the individual teacher at any time. If there are any general questions, parents can call the guidance counselor or the team leader.

Integrated curricula and teaming are ideally suited to the middle level students because they provide many and varied opportunities for success, exploration and growth. They have a positive impact on the quality of student performance based on interdisciplinary instruction and open communication. We are currently exploring innovative possibilities for the expansion of teaming, whose overall goal is to ensure our students' success.