Nurturing interdisciplinary practice in small secondary schools

This paper reports on the perspectives and operational practices of teachers implementing interdisciplinary units in five International Baccalaureate schools in Norway and Denmark with fewer than 100 students in their Middle Years Programme. The results help explain why interdisciplinary practice in secondary schools is relatively rare. The collaborative process of developing unique school-based interdisciplinary units, as required in each year of the program, was consistently valued by teachers, but no administration recognized the impact on their workload. On average, teachers estimated that over 17 hours were required to design and evaluate an interdisciplinary unit, and a further seven hours were required to assess and moderate student reflections. On average, schools allocated three hours of collaborative planning for this task. Small schools are uniquely enabled to offset some of the complexities of interdisciplinary practice that frustrate larger schools. In the interests of nurturing consensus cultures that support their interdisciplinary practice, the results indicate small schools should allocate additional collaborative planning time, organize teaching schedules around the interdisciplinary subject linkages, pair teachers in shared workspaces, and offer teachers involved in interdisciplinary unit implementation greater flexibility to attend staff meetings.