Designing Effective Work Teams

¶ … Americans have been up in arms about the current state of public education and demanding changes. While many new schools are being built for new students, bus routes are being changed to accommodate the need and teachers continue to negotiate salaries, the single most important factor to providing a good education is the curriculum choices being made.

Once the basic skills are learned and students prepare to enter middle school, the curriculum is the deciding factor on how those students will learn and be prepared for high school and the world. An integrated curriculum at the middle school level is the strongest and single most effective method of preparing those students for the future. While there is some argument for maintaining middle school as a basic education atmosphere the use of an integrated curriculum makes more sense in the current globalization process being experienced today.

This new vision begins with two kinds of questions: those that early adolescents have about themselves and their world and those widely shared by people in the larger world (Beane, 1990a). Early adolescents often have questions about the physical changes they're experiencing, their identities, their relations with peers and adult authority figures, and their prospects. At the same time, they share with all of us concerns about life in a changing world, the environment, wealth and poverty, cultural diversity and racism, and so on.

Moreover, their questions about themselves are often personal versions of a larger-world question, concerning, for example, the connections between conflict with adults and peers and conflict on a global scale (Integrated Curriculum in the Middle Schools by (http://ericps.ed.uiuc.edu/eece/pubs/digests/1992/beane92.html).In other words, at the intersection of concerns from early adolescents and from the larger world, we can begin to imagine powerful themes that connect the two and thus offer a promising possibility for organizing an integrative curriculum (Integrated Curriculum in the Middle Schools by (http://ericps.ed.uiuc.edu/eece/pubs/digests/1992/beane92.html)." An integrated curriculum involves the students in the process.

An example of such a curriculum might be students listing questions about themselves and then discussing how many different themes and subject areas those questions address. This idea promotes creating a motivator for learning as the students will be studying academics for the purpose of answering questions that they themselves have. There are several positive reasons to use an integrated curriculum in the education of middle school students including: It compels teachers to work with students in ways that give the students a powerful voice in curriculum planning.

It proceeds from a constructivist view. It is knowledge-rich. Knowledge and skill are taken out of abstract subject categories and repositioned in the context of thematic units where they are more likely to develop. This curriculum presents an authentic integration of affect and cognition.

The new curriculum departs from arrangements such as the earlier block-time core programs, which were scheduled alongside traditional subject courses, in that it is meant to serve as virtually the entire curriculum (Integrated Curriculum in the Middle Schools by (http://ericps.ed.uiuc.edu/eece/pubs/digests/1992/beane92.html)." The need to change the basic structure of middle school has been studied for three decades.