Designing fully interdisciplinary units can be a heavy lift—more than most teachers have time for in a typical school year.
But interdisciplinary teaching isn’t all-or-nothing. Even small moves can have a big impact on students.
In this interview, Lauren Brown shares lightweight approaches—like making a spreadsheet of what everyone is teaching each month—that any teacher can use.
Links:
Strategies to Improve Writing in History Class, by Lauren Brown in MiddleWeb
Teaching with Colleagues Expands Kids’ Learning, by Lauren Brown in MiddleWeb
Substack: Lauren Brown on Education
Lauren Brown’s articles on MiddleWeb
Full Transcript:
Justin Baeder (00:09):
Welcome to the Teaching Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Lauren Brown to talk about interdisciplinary teaching. Lauren, welcome to The Teaching Show.
Lauren Brown (00:20):
Thanks so much, Justin. Pleasure to be here.
Justin Baeder (00:22):
Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into our topic of interdisciplinary teaching.
Lauren Brown (00:27):
So I’m a history teacher, US history primarily. I’ve taught middle school, high school, and also at the college level, teaching pre-service teachers. And now I’m writing on Substack and putting those 20 plus years in the classroom to work to help other teachers teach history ways that are more meaningful and memorable for their students.
Justin Baeder (00:51):
And I saw your article, Teaching with Colleagues Expands Kids’ Learning, which talks about an idea that’s certainly not a new idea, but one that I think maybe is having a renaissance or deserves a renaissance. Talk to us a little bit about that, about teaching with your colleagues.
Lauren Brown (01:06):
Sure. I think “deserves a renaissance” is probably more accurate. So my first year of teaching, I actually did not teach US history. I taught world geography and I worked with a team of teachers. I was the newbie and everyone else was more experienced.
And so we did this big interdisciplinary unit. The first one we did, the science teacher had initiated it. I was in central Wisconsin and he was talking about prairies in his class. And so we pulled together a whole big interdisciplinary unit. And then we did a lot of others after that. We did one on rivers. We were in a town with a river. We did one coming out of my curriculum on Africa, looking at science connections with biomes in Africa, and then obviously literature. The math connections were always a little bit more challenging, but still there. And they required a lot of work and a lot of effort.
(02:00):
And when I shifted to high school teaching and US history, I found that there was all these potential opportunities, particularly with ELA. I mean, with English, that’s the natural sort of connection. And then when I went back to middle school, again, thinking about these opportunities, there wasn’t the bandwidth to do big interdisciplinary units like the ones I had first started off with, but there were all these little moments. And so I think it’s those little moments. We have all heard so much about teacher burnout and all the things going on with that. It’s a big ask to put together interdisciplinary units, but even in these very small ways, we can start that process and then see where that takes us.
Justin Baeder (02:48):
Yeah. And you’ve seen some remarkable response from students, even if the connection was fairly small. How do students respond when they see connections between classes? So
Lauren Brown (02:58):
Yeah, that’s what led me to this. There was this moment, I could count on it every year when I was teaching about World War II and US entry into the war and what was going on in Europe at the time and how did Americans respond to that. And I had made a brief mention of the Spanish Civil War and like clockwork. There would be a student or two or three in every class would say, “Oh my God, Ms. Brown, we did a whole thing on that and Ms. So- and-so’s class in Spanish.” And it was like all of a sudden what I was saying mattered and it was real. And anyone who’s ever taught in any grade, you know when you have a student who maybe something with their parents or they were reading a book and they read or hear about something that you had talked about in class.
(03:48):
They’re so excited. Have you had that experience where kids are like, “Oh my God, Ms. Brown, we were at the such and such museum or my grandmother was talking about blah, blah, blah.” And she mentioned that book that you had talked about in class and they’re excited to share that. And that was what I saw happen when like I mentioned the Spanish Civil War or in when I was teaching about a certain poem, like The White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling is a classic poem that you talk about when you’re talking about US imperialism and students who had been moaning and groaning, I heard them in advisory class or in the moments before class complaining about their poetry unit in ELA and then all of a sudden we’re doing this poem and you could see them kind of like strutting in their seats a little to sort of share things like metaphor and simile and patterns and rhyming things that they had learned about in ELA.
(04:45):
So this subject that was maybe boring or isolated in ELA, all of a sudden when they saw, oh, that’s a real thing analyzing poems because now this other teacher in another class is talking about it or when we do Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, a classic poem, when you’re talking about immigration, the one that’s on the Statue of Liberty.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
—”The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
And so when things ... It’s like they become real to students and they’re excited to make those connections. And we know from the science of learning that the more connections that you have, the greater the learning sticks.
Justin Baeder (05:27):
Yeah. It seems like there’s the cognitive science layer where kids are developing schema, they’re getting introduced to different topics from different sources over time and their kind of network of knowledge builds and things have more to stick to so they retain more and they understand at a deeper level, so kind of the traditional cognitive science view.
But then it also strikes me that there is kind of a credibility view whereas as adults, kids don’t necessarily care about the same things we care about or take us seriously when we say, “This is really important, you need to know this.”
But when they hear somebody else talk, even if it’s another adult that they would see the same way, if they have multiple adults seemingly independently bringing up, “Hey, this is an important thing. This is an important skill. This is an important topic to be knowledgeable about,” that creates some sort of credibility with them that I just don’t think we can reproduce any other way.
Lauren Brown (06:21):
Exactly. It becomes more meaningful. I mean, I can’t even tell you how much my students always complain about the vocabulary they have to learn for English class and yet when they are able to use a vocabulary word in one of my essays, they are so proud. Ms. Brown, did you notice that we use that vocab word because I made it a point to talk about those and use those words in my class. And when I do use a word, sometimes I don’t even know because I’m not looking at that every time. So I’ll be talking about something and I’ll use a word that’s on their English vocabulary list and some student will invariably say, “Oh my God, that’s one of our vocab words from this week.” And all of a sudden it makes that connection. And so they learn the words more. And we know that learning vocabulary, it’s better to do it in context.
(07:09):
Kids are more likely to learn it in context rather than memorize words for a vocabulary test in a class, in isolation.
Justin Baeder (07:18):
Well, Lauren, in your middle web article, you talk about some kind of in depth examples of interdisciplinary teaching, but you also talk about how it can be pretty lightweight. And you have some ideas on how teachers can kind of communicate and coordinate and maybe identify ways to line up what they’re doing with one another that aren’t such a heavy lift and that don’t require months and months of planning. Take us into that a little bit.
Lauren Brown (07:42):
Yeah. So I was thinking about it and how much work it was to create those interdisciplinary units that I did as a young teacher and recognizing how challenging it is, particularly if you work in a larger school, it’s very departmentalized, it can be very difficult, but there’s some really easy things that I think could be done and it maybe requires some leadership from administration, maybe as simple as creating some sort of spreadsheet and giving teachers the time, perhaps at a staff meeting or something to sort of fill in what are the topics that they teach and then giving time for people to look over that list and seeing where there’s some intersection. So for example, is there anything I do in my US history curriculum that ever mentions a piece of music ever? Is there something that the music teacher, the chorus teacher or the band teacher or somebody could use there and just think about that.
(08:38):
And of course there are, when you get to the jazz age in the 1920s or if you’re doing slave spirituals or things like that. And then maybe you write that down and then the music teacher looks and it’s like slave spirituals. I’m not sure what I could do with that, but like, oh, the jez age, there’s that one piece that we play in band, blah, blah, blah. And same as it is with like with art, with science. I think in my article, I had pointed out something about Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee University and the Tuskegee experiments and students were really excited when they heard about something like that in science class. So is there anything that, say a Spanish teacher does that has anything to do with history? Oh, well, I do this thing about the Spanish Civil War or I’m the French teacher and I have my students do a little bit about French history.
(09:25):
And so that might intersect the French and Indian war or Napoleon or the French Revolution. And maybe they don’t know, but they know it has something has to do with history. And then I’m looking at it and I see, oh, well, sure. When we talk about the American Revolution and then afterwards and these ideas about freedom and liberty, then I can remind them about the French revolution. And then you can add dates to those things too so that teachers can make it a point. And then maybe at several points throughout the year of allowing space or time in a staff meeting for people to look on that and make connections and have time to talk to each other. We don’t have a lot of time during the school day to run down the hall necessarily and talk to the Spanish teacher, but if there’s set aside time in a department meeting where people can have those conversations, then maybe they can happen ... It’s not going to happen completely organically, but if you give them the time and the space to do it at a staff meeting, then maybe you can.
Justin Baeder (10:26):
Yeah, absolutely. As simple as a little bit of time, a Google Doc spreadsheet, something like that where people can coordinate. I’m also thinking about not only topics like wars and history and things like that, but also some of the skills, if we’re teaching in language arts or math, at certain times of year, sometimes we want raw material or real examples to use. And on the other hand, in other content areas, we want to know when the students are learning these skills. When are they learning about perimeter so that I can use that in my class a bit, knowing that it’s not going to probably be a month long collaboration. We’re not going to do an interdisciplinary unit on perimeter and farming or something, but little connections can go a long way, I think, for kids.
Lauren Brown (11:11):
Yeah. Two things I want to respond to that. One, you’re right. Little connections go a long way. It just enriches the curriculum and enriches those connections and synapses in the brain or whatever.
And the other thing is about the skills. If I had a dollar for every time a student said to me, Ms. Brown, this is an English class as I’m talking to them about their writing, I think we need to remember how much reading and writing are the responsibility of every single adult in a school.
And so if we have common language about how we do that, I’ve really loved The Writing Revolution by Judith Hockman and Natalie Wexler that talk about ways that you can write. And these are things that are really accessible to every discipline. And so, and I have a MiddleWeb article on that too, maybe you can link to in the show notes about using words like but because and so, and talking about a positives and these are grammar terms that we don’t ... It’s not that we care if students know what a certain part of speech is, but that we understand how it enriches their writing and it can enrich their writing, not just in English class, but in any class where they’re doing writing or asking to do writing.
Justin Baeder (12:32):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Love it. Well, Lauren, if people want to find your writing, where’s your Substack and how can they find you there?
Lauren Brown (12:41):
It’s called Lauren Brown on Education. And I write there about broad education issues in general, and I have a subsection of it called the US History Teachers Lounge that’s for US History Teachers in particular, where I’m really digging deeper into topics for US history teachers. So check me out there. Lauren Brown on Education on Substack.
Justin Baeder (13:04):
We’ll put a link in the show notes as well as a link to your MiddleWeb articles. Lauren Brown, thank you so much for joining me on The Teaching Show.
Lauren Brown (13:11):
Thank you.
