Cross-Discipline College Projects

I am working as an instructional coach on an exciting pilot project with a community college. The purpose of this pilot is to support college students who test into developmental education in achieving a two-year college degree, and if desired, to successfully move on into a four-year degree program.


Our team is made up of the instructors who teach developmental reading, writing, math, college success and their full-time resource specialist. Our task is to use the research to implement evidence based practices that have been shown to support these students in becoming successful college graduates.


The core components of these evidence-based practices include creating a learning community in which students take all their courses together and work collaboratively on assignments, and integrating learning through a cross-curricular, meaningful project that will be shared publicly. This project will grow out of a relevant driving question and involve cross-discipline inquiry to solve the problem or answer the question, producing a meaningful product that contributes, in some way, to others.

My job as the instructional coach is to facilitate the team as they work to create an integrated, cross-discipline and meaningful project in collaboration with each other. This is a huge paradigm shift for college faculty who are used to having a very high degree of autonomy in how they teach to meet the standards. College instructors are also not generally accustomed to having people in their classroom observing them, working with their peers to identify and enhance the connections their courses share, and most certainly not accustomed to planning and implementing a project together that will cut across all of their courses to result in a publicly viewed project designed to contribute in some way to their college community.

My hat goes off to this team who have hit the ground running, have built their own Community Agreement for how they'd like to work together, have decided they need some social get-acquainted time off campus with each other, and are graciously opening their classroom doors to their colleagues for observations. In addition, yesterday we finished our "backwards design" process for creating a blended program outcomes matrix with skills, concepts, issues and themes that show the cross-discipline overlap and highlight the starting place for creating a cross-curricular project.

Stay tuned for updates on how math, reading, writing and college success become integrated into a meaningful and relevant driving question for launching a cross-curricular project.