Running head: CONTENT KNOWLEDGE 1

Content Knowledge in Interdisciplinary Instruction

Faith Ferrulli

Regent University

In partial fulfillment of UED 495 Field Experience ePortfolio, Spring 2021

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Introduction

Integrating more than one content area in a lesson plan provides a path to support student

academic achievement. This is accomplished through a clear understanding of the topics being

discussed and incorporating topics students have learned, are learning, or will learn in another

content area in a fluent and precise manner. By first referring to the standards of learning and

then communicating with my team teacher, who teaches math, science, and social studies, I

developed lessons that would set the stage for future discussion of the topics in both science and

social studies. Incorporating the other content areas into language arts allows for extra support of

content knowledge for the students. It also introduces them to the concept of using language arts

skills across the curriculum to engage in their learning. The two artifacts used to represent this

competency are a science-based language arts performance task and two language arts lessons

revolving around a social studies concept.

Rationale for Selection of Artifacts

Artifact One

At the beginning of our current unit in language arts, we took on a performance task. In

third grade, we are trying to get students to become more independent in their learning and

achieve higher goals by themselves. The purpose of the performance task was to see where the

students were in their ability to read nonfiction articles about energy sources, demonstrate

comprehension, take notes, and craft an informative or explanatory piece of writing using proper

grammar and mechanics. The task took a total of five days and was formatted into a gradual

release model, with the last day being completely independent while students reviewed and made

edits to their writing. The first two days, we looked at articles and took notes, while the third day

was spent answering three research questions based on our readings of the articles. The research
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questions provided a gauge of understanding and comprehension for the students while also

setting the groundwork for their writing piece. On the fourth day, they developed their

informative or explanatory writing piece by first filling out a graphic organizer on a Google Slide

and then transferring it into a completed essay. The performance task was mundane when first

viewed, so to make it more engaging for the students, I crafted the idea of creating reporter

badges and press packets for the students so they felt purpose in taking a role to complete their

work. Not only was it more exciting for them, but it also tied in the idea that when they are

writing, they must understand what type of audience they are writing for, along with the genre of

the writing as a whole.

The purpose of using this activity to represent this competency is the idea that we used a

science topic of energy sources as our focus for crafting an informative or explanatory essay

around. Students were able to grow in their understanding of the science topic while also

developing their language arts skills. To further reinforce the science portion of the lesson, I

assigned an article to read on ReadWorks where they learned more about energy and how to keep

our planet clean. They completed this article and the questions that went with it during their

independent task time while conducting small groups throughout the week.

Artifact Two

In the upcoming unit of social studies, students will be diving into the topic of Ancient

Greece. While virtual, they discussed Ancient China and Ancient Egypt, and I could incorporate

those topics into a language arts lesson while virtual. Considering that Ancient Greece was the

next topic matter for them in social studies, I made sure to incorporate text relating to it in two of

our lessons. The first lesson consisted of an image flood where I provided students with eighteen

images from Ancient Greece that were displayed one at a time on the board. Thi lesson's purpose
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was to generate curiosity among the students and build upon their skills to formulate questions

based on their curiosity. To enhance these skills, we used the See, Think, Wonder anchor chart,

where students wrote what they saw, thought, and wondered based on the images on a sticky

note attached to the anchor chart. The second lesson also focused on Ancient Greece; however,

the text we used was from their social studies textbook about Ancient Greece. With this lesson,

the purpose was to gain an understanding of Ancient Greece and what the Greeks created while

developing their skills to decipher between important and irrelevant information while creating

main idea statements to support their overall summary of the text.

Both of these lessons were chosen to represent this competency as they introduced the

social studies topic of Ancient Greece and enhanced their ability to find key details in nonfiction

text to use in their summaries. To further reinforce the social studies concept, I provided students

with an image sort where they matched the images from the image flood to the explanation of

what the image was showing. In addition, I assigned articles on ReadWorks that related to the

topic of Ancient Greece and provided them with varying questions to enhance comprehension

and develop their language arts skills.

Reflection on Theory and Practice

The teacher must clearly understand the focus of the content being taught and discussed

to build upon and enhance the students' skills. Students will generate questions and, as a teacher,

we must guide them in finding the answer. When a given lesson reinforces an idea from another

subject area, there is an increased level of cohesiveness within the students' education. The

reinforcement generated from the understanding of content knowledge across the curriculum and

incorporated into lessons allows students to develop further into skills from Bloom's Taxonomy.

Throughout the courses of education at Regent, there was always a highlight on incorporating
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more than one content area into a lesson to reinforce comprehension and understanding and

utilize teaching minutes with efficiency.

It is essential to understand what interdisciplinary instruction means to integrate it into

lessons for students properly. Interdisciplinary instruction is viewed in the manner of combining

more than one content area into a lesson. However, "each discipline maintains its integrity while

connections between the disciplines are made explicit such that there is a clear understanding of

what skills and strategies come from each content area and their purpose for support in relation

to the other" (Young, 2008, p. 4). The use of content knowledge from other areas promotes

literacy and supports learning. This concept is "supported, recommended, and encouraged by the

International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English

(NCTE)" (Young, 2008, p. 2).

Research was conducted to look at common trends of student achievement given

interdisciplinary curriculum to support science and language arts integration. The overall trends

on science and literacy outcomes in elementary schools have supported the concept that

"integrated approaches not only benefit student science learning outcomes, but also support

student literacy development" (Cervetti, Barber, Dorph, Pearson, & Goldschmidt, 2012, p. 652).

To support the integration of social studies and language arts, there was an understanding that

"as children listen, discuss, read, and write about social studies content, they develop a deeper

understanding and appreciation of social studies and its respective social sciences" (Farris, 2015,

p. 68). By providing students with a text that increases their comprehension of social studies yet

simultaneously enhances their literary skills, there is an increase in student achievement. An

interdisciplinary curriculum puts the students at the focus and modifies lessons to enrich their

educational experience across all content areas.

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References

Cervetti, G. N., Barber, J., Dorph, R., Pearson, P. D., & Goldschmidt, P. G. (2012). The impact

of an integrated approach to science and literacy in elementary school

classrooms. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49(5), 631-

658. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21015.

Farris, P. J. (2015). Elementary and middle school social studies: An interdisciplinary,

multicultural approach. Waveland Press.

Young, T. A. (2008). Why research on interdisciplinary language arts and science instruction? In

V. L. Akerson (Ed.), Interdisciplinary language arts and science instruction in

elementary classrooms: Applying research to practice (pp. 2-10). Mahwah, NJ:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.