Designing Integrated Curriculum 7/27-8/2/15

Project Based Learning (PBL) is the perfect opportunity to integrate curriculum from multiple content areas. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) challenge teachers to creat authentic learning experiences and our standards from multiple content areas dovetail together more seamlessly than before.

Currently my school has been building to this. We've begun with having weekly collaboration time for teachers from every department as a professional learning community. Basically instead of having a common plan with other math teachers, now we have a plan with science, social studies, and English. This common plan time allows instructors the time to build cross curricular units with each other.  

This process would begin by brainstorming together.  This could start with a novel for English courses that contains enough historical content to pull in History.  History would then pull in the Architecture and arts from the time period. Architecture could correlate with math by calculation slope of stairs, or the arc in an arch, area of buildings, etc.