I am still as excited as ever about developing a new Interdisciplinary Unit, but I have hit a few snags over the past two weeks and I need to take a moment to think through what I can do to overcome those issues.
The first issue is one of timing. I am working under the assumption that timetables for grade 8 teachers at my school will remain more or less the same next year. That being said, there don't seem to be any "good" days on which to run an IDU. A "good" day is one in which it would be possible to run the IDU without impacting any specialist classes such as Physical Education, Family Studies or Technology Education.
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| Timetable for 2017-18 I teach Math, Français, Mode de Vie, ELA, Health & Art |
Rebecca (the other teacher who is really passionate about the idea of an Interdisciplinary Unit based around the Bay of Fundy) and I have been trying to problem solve this issue, and we are running into difficulty because the project itself requires the input and cooperation of so many other teachers. It's not something that we can do on our own, and finding time to meet with such a large group of teachers is challenging. Time to meet is not the only challenge, we also need most teachers to be as excited about the prospect of a new IDU as we are, with the understanding that getting something like this off the ground takes a lot of work. People are at various points in their careers, in their personal lives, and in their passion about project based learning, and those differences can create a barrier to working together to create something new.
Moving forward, I want to look at the possibility of running this IDU on a smaller scale, so that I could do it within my own classroom without impacting anybody else. It's not as all-encompassing as I would like, but doing a pilot project on my own would mean I can work out some of the bugs before proposing it to the entire grade 8 team of teachers.
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