How can the best of mathematical problem-based learning be applied toward literature classes? Daniel Sussman, an English teacher at Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey, discusses how he uses problem solving tactics to encourage close, critical reading of fiction texts in his Jewish literature and poetry classes. He explores the challenges of…

A curricular anchor is a complex problem that students acknowledge as worth solving and that validates learning a set of relevant skills and concepts. To motivate students, anchors must capture the imagination, be perceived as important by learners, legitimize the disciplinary content they integrate, and accommodate a variety of learning…

Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

Except for its relationship to science, mathematics is the forgotten cousin in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. In the Journeys in Mathematics project, teachers engage children in imaginative activities that inspire them to identify patterns and relationships, solve problems, and communicate accurately, using Jonathan Swift's…

A Maryland middle-school teacher can no longer imagine a math classroom without computers, word processing programs, graphing calculators, graphic design programs, and colored printers and monitors. Aided by these devices, her students made great leaps toward the 21st-century technology goals spelled out by the Department of Education in 1995.…

A Washington State first-grade teacher and her students created the Learning-Centered Curriculum-Making Project, developing each unit over a two-week period and highlighting language and thinking skills related to various subject disciplines. They used dialog, coaching, modeling, questioning, and reinforcing techniques. Students helped select…

The intellectual disciplines comprising the traditional curriculum are actually territorial spaces carved out by academic scholars for their own purpose. Although middle-level educators have been engaged in reform efforts for two decades, the interdisciplinary, integrated curriculum is still rare and a working definition of a middle school…

Technology offers tools and information that students need to explore real-world mathematical connections and investigate questions reflecting their own interests. This article illustrates how students can use technology to gather and interpret information, perform descriptive and graphical analysis, make statistical predictions, and create and…

In the Discover Lab, a science education center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, students learn to investigate, critique, and test big scientific questions and devise their own answers. Students are guided through cyclical processes of inquiry, logic and reasoning, testing and experimentation, and communication. (MLH)

Suburban Chicago middle school teachers designed a month-long unit to foster global education, guided by research on integrated, self-selected, and collaborative learning strategies. Teachers initiated brainstorming activities, grouped students by interest, and demonstrated how to be investigative researchers, informative writers, effective…