When Great Meadows Middle School decided to restructure their curriculum, they chose to take an integrated approach to teaching across the content areas. While integration can be an effective way to teach middle school students, there are some inherent problems with implementation and maintenance of the system. Some of these issues are easily rectified by moderating the breadth and depth of integration; other issues are systemic in nature and can only be addressed by modifying curriculum integration to fit within established educational policies and practices. .
The term "integrated curriculum" can mean many things to educators; it can encompass enrichment in a discipline or connections between disciplines along topics or themes so that subject areas become secondary to the theme (Weilbacher, 2001). No matter the level of integration, there are advantages and disadvantages to the approach and using it effectively requires a delicate balancing act between the needs to address the requirements of high stakes testing with the desire to engage students in what they need to learn. .
With integrated curriculum, learning is about relationships and relevance that allow the students to engage with and retain more information in an instructional day (Weilbacher, 2001). When students look at material as problems to solve, they are more engaged, and "one of the best ways to promote problem solving is through an enriched environment that makes connections among several disciplines " (Loepp, 1999, p. 2). .
How Effective is the Strategy and How Might Concerns Be Addressed.
By choosing an integrated curricular strategy, Great Meadows Middle School has embraced the idea that students are more engaged when they are thinking rather than just engaging in rote memorization. Putting things together across disciplines is a good idea, but the school is not clear on what specific model they will use. The term "integrated curriculum"" is too broad to give a clear indication.