‘When Am I Going to Use This?’: Building Cross-Curricular Lesson Plans

On our way to school today, my daughter joined a time-honored tradition of student pushback, uttering, “But when am I going to use this?”

I understand her frustration. As an educator, I’m in a unique position to see evidence of the skills I’m teaching students in a variety of content areas. For some students, though, the artificial walls between content areas compartmentalize learning. This inhibits a student’s ability to see how such skills are connected to their lives or their larger body of knowledge. Cross-curricular lesson planning can address this issue.

In his piece “Deeper Learning: Why Cross-Curricular Teaching is Essential,” education blogger Ben Johnson notes that “deeper learning can be accelerated by consolidating teacher efforts and combining relevant contents.” Helping students draw connections between individual skills or content areas is the foundation of building a deeper understanding of the world: knowledge and transfer rather than rote memorization of content.

Breaking down walls between content areas

Cross-curricular lesson planning tries to unite more than one content area in lectures, assignments or even full units of study. Instructors can team up with a teacher in another content area and find overlapping areas in their teaching goals. This leads to concept-based learning activities where teachers combine enthusiasm and energy to show how their content areas interact.

Such work can help students understand the importance of individual skill sets and how they harmonize with larger goals. This work supports the transfer of student knowledge by answering “when am I going to need this” in immediate ways. It also creates an opportunity for contextualizing and connecting content knowledge, making students more likely to remember what they have learned.

Cross-curricular planning

Some study areas, such as writing, are easy to translate across a curriculum. Students who learn the specifics of essay writing in English or composition courses can readily practice those skills in every class from science to math. A math student can be challenged to explain a theorem or whether a formula can be applied in a certain circumstance through an essay.

Student skills at such assignments can be enhanced when their teachers team up and teach and accept the assignment from both subject areas. Better yet, the teachers can team-teach the overlapping units of study, offering overlapping rubrics and accepting assignments for points in both classes.

Creating cross-curricular lesson plans in other content areas is slightly more difficult. History and math instructors, for example, may struggle with integrating assignments. Some brainstorming on teaching goals can lead to interesting potential projects like having students use algebra to predict the size of Revolutionary War regiments or calculating the cost of creating them. Applying math in such a way creates a deeper understanding of the historical position of Revolutionary war soldiers as well as highlighting how math is found in the “real world.”

Denied a standard 13×9-inch pan, a culinary-skills class can calculate pan volumes to find the best new fit, while physical education students can consider how trigonometry or physics apply to the baseball diamond.

It’s not always easy

Cross-curricular lesson planning has limitations. Instructors must be personally invested and have the time to work in teams creating such plans. They also need to find good partners they can work side by side with and create opportunities in their schedules to combine classes.  Administrators, curriculum designers and teacher leaders should find and support teachers who are interested in creating such assignments with proper planning time and other necessary resources.

But it’s worth it

Creating cross-curricular learning opportunities is an important investment of time and effort. Educators who start small with simple assignments may find that they expand their offerings or teacher pairings over time, creating a complex network of interrelated content and coursework helping students see the full connectedness of everything they learn.

Monica Fuglei is a graduate of the University of Nebraska in Omaha and a current faculty member of Arapahoe Community College in Colorado, where she teaches composition and creative writing.