What matters in interdisciplinary unit design - messages from small secondary schools.

What is it about?

The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (MYP), for students aged 11-16, requires teachers to implement interdisciplinary units (IDUs) in each year of the program. These units are created by teachers and are specific to the context of their schools. Their performance assessments require students to reflect on their ‘product’, for example, how it synthesised ideas from the participating subjects. In the MYP, completing annual IDUs prepares students for reflecting on their culminating task, their Personal Project. This paper reports design features of IDUs as they were enacted in Norway and Denmark, in schools with fewer than 100 MYP students. There were no significant differences in the design features of the 37 actual IDUs from participating schools, and the 111 ‘hypothetical’ units reported by experienced teachers in a survey. • Typically, IDUs were enacted over eight weeks, and paired two subjects. This is likely to represent 20% of the teaching time of each participating subject in any one year. • Nearly all subject pairings were considered feasible. There was no evidence that the frequency of different subject combinations changed during the five years of the programme, although the numbers are small. IDUs iterate design features of disciplinary MYP units that are familiar to students. • As a ‘conceptual curriculum’, that recommends ‘Key’ and ‘Related Concepts’ for each MYP subject, most IDUs selected a Key Concept that was common to both participating subjects and differentiated the contributions of participating subjects by using their specific Related Concepts. • The MYP’s ‘Global Contexts’ aim to situate the unit’s content in a setting that students can relate to. All six Global Contexts were represented in the actual samples, but IDUs for younger students (MYP 1-3, for students aged 11-14) were much more likely to use ‘Identities and Relationships’ and ‘Personal and Cultural Expression’. Interviewed teachers consistently reported they valued IDUs for helping students understand connections between their subject and others.

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Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Interdisciplinary approaches in curriculums are being advocated by international and national systems to position students for their education futures. Interdisciplinary approaches are examples of tasks that are likely to be ‘Complex, Unfamiliar and Non-routine’, which help students develop metacognition. However, interdisciplinary teaching remains relatively rare in secondary schools. This paper suggests that a sustainable approach to interdisciplinary learning iterates unit design features that teachers and students are already familiar with, including the implementation time frames, which may represent 20% of the academic school year of each of the participating subjects. Within the course of a five-year programme, this fraction is unlikely to threaten the development of students’ epistemic understanding of disciplinary knowledge.

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