Tearing Down the Classroom Walls: Analyzing the Effects of Interdisciplinary Team Teaching

While some school districts and enterprising principals have begun to blur the lines between grade levels, most students in the American educational system still compartmentalize their twelve compulsory years of schooling into three distinct units: namely, elementary school (kindergarten to fifth grade), intermediate or middle school (sixth to eighth grade), and high school (ninth to twelfth grade). Among the myriad institutional changes that students experience as they proceed through this system are a steady increase in the number of teachers that they see in a day, as well as the number of subjects that are taught. While elementary school teachers often take a generalist approach, creating units that incorporate multiple disciplines and teaching them to a small, stable community of students, high school teachers see themselves as specialists in narrowly-defined subject areas, which they teach in great detail to revolving groups of students during the school day. Multiple reasons exist for the increasing diversification of the school day as students move through intermediate and high school – the sheer volume and depth of material that society has determined that high school graduates must possess, standardized testing