C39 (Intro): Creating Transdisciplinary Connections with Standards

​One of the greatest challenges as a PYP educator and coordinator has been making transdisciplinary connections using our standards.  Whatever school situation, it has felt like a tug of war between the standards vs. the PYP.  What many people don’t realize is that the standards drive the learning in the PYP, but we look at their relationship differently.

My hope in this episode that you will see how the different content areas and the elements of the PYP come together to create something colorful.

Teaching standards in a traditional classroom

If you enter a traditional classroom, you will find the teacher is leading lessons founded on district or curriculum planning guides.  The lessons are departmentalized and there are absolutely no connections between them.  This happens, because the district has different curriculum departments that create pacing calendars and planning guides in isolation.  Their purpose is to ensure the content is covered throughout the year, not necessarily to find connections between the learning. 

A teacher will have a read aloud for the reading lesson and a different one for writing that has been chosen by the district curriculum guides.  There is no connection between the social studies and science that is being learned at the same time.  

As a result, the learning is compartmentalized and the learners have to remember a lot of the terms in isolation, which meets short-term learning goals for a unit, district, or end of year assessment.  By the following year, the student has dismissed the content and they cannot replicate processes to new learning situations. 

These images show the difference between attending school to learn "subjects" or "content" OR teaching learners how to connect the big ideas between the subjects to make sense of their world. 

Teaching standards in a transdisciplinary classroom

If you enter a transdisciplinary classroom, you will find some direct instruction of subject-area content, since facts are the foundation of understanding.  But, the learners go beyond the facts in isolated content areas and try to bridge them together through the use of key and related concepts. 

Learning has a purpose, which is called the central idea.  This central idea provides an anchor for all the learning in the unit of inquiry, because it’s been derived from a concept(s) in the transdisciplinary theme descriptor.  The content being shared within a unit always ties back as an example of the central idea.  We do this through the lines of inquiry, the know and do of the unit.  

As students go throughout the day, they are learning about the lines of inquiry, central ideas, and/or key and related concepts to create connections between the various content areas.  This is what creates generalizations and transfer. 

If we go back to our standards from our previous challenge, we can see use an example to help us see this connection in action.

• Social Studies:  Examine different resources of places & regions
• Science:  Basic needs of plants and animals based on location
• ELA: Folktales 
• Math: Coins up to a dollar; Symbols:  cent, dollar, decimal

In isolation, the standards don’t look like they have much connection.   When you look deeper, you can always find ways to connect them together using concepts. We will explore the relationship of using standards with central ideas and lines of inquiry when we explore concepts in our next series. For now, let’s take baby steps and use the key and related concepts. 

When I look at the standards above, the related concept that comes to mind is LOCATION.  

• Social Studies: The resources we have are largely determined by their location.  
• Science:  Plants and animals will have different needs based on where they live, the climate, and their ecosystem. 
• ELA:  all folktales are centered around how a particular culture interacts and perceives the world.  This is largely determined by their location. 
• Math:  based on where you live, the symbols for money will look differently, but they generally have the same purpose. 

Our goal is to find a connection between the content we teach, so it’s easier for our students to make meaningful applications.  Quite simple really, right? 

Let’s go on to our challenge to see how we can do this with our own curriculum.