The Key to Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind

SUMMARY: To collaborate effectively, educators need to develop and apply interdisciplinary habits of mind. Observations and questions are provided around such concepts as connections, complexity, method, creativity, inquiry, diversity, innovation, and metacognition.


Collaboration: Just Talk?

Educators seek to collaborate with each other to improve teaching and learning. However, without the habits of interdisciplinary thinking and acting such collaboration is often short-lived and ineffective.

Interdisciplinary Habits of Mind

True collaboration is not merely collegiality,  cooperation, or consultation among teachers, teacher-librarians, administrators, and instructional support staff. It depends on shifting the mind away from a narrow subject-based topic to focussing on how learners learn. This shift requires a interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary approach.

In future blogs I will return with detail and examples to each of the qualities of mind in the diagram to the right. For now, I'll make some quick observations and ask a few pertinent questions.

Connections: What's a meta for?

The ability to make connections between apparently disparate phenomena lies at the heart of learning, let alone learning something new. The power of metaphor, comparison, and analogy can be harnessed at all grades and contexts. We are all capable of what some call "the poetic imagination."

How often do we build in connections from prior learning to new learning by referring to objects, people, ideas, and events outside our immediate discipline?

Complexity: How simple is simplicity?

It is relatively simpler to study the parts separately than connect them into a whole for deeper meaning. Synthesis requires analysis. The interdisciplinary mind deliberately woos complexity. Wisdom often comes when complex data resolves into unified insight.

How often do we encourage students to approach information as random data and to hold off developing a theory or conclusion for days or weeks?

Method: How systematic is your system?

Any system for initiating, testing, organizing, or processing information is limited by both the thinker's experience and his/her discipline's assumptions. Imagine the learning power from watching the music teacher "compose" a piece according to mathematical principles or the mathematician turn an equation into a musical sequence. Scientific method and poetic analysis have much in common.

How many of us master each discipline's method of inquiry and model them all with our students at the appropriate time?

Creativity: What was Leonardo's Secret?

Who knows! However, the ambidextrous, techno-scientist, military architect, and medical artist knew that curiosity -- a key to creativity --  is a process of the mind, heart, and body that is not bound by a particular discipline.

How often do we ask ask students to study the creative process of the men and women behind the particular disciplinary topic currently being studied?

Inquiry: Is it a process or destination?

To explore, investigate, process, and create is a bond among all disciplines in the curriculum. Elementary schools are more likely to promote school-wide inquiry activities that share interdisciplinary knowledge. Is that because we feel we need to "cover" the curriculum in secondary school and assess the product of learning above all?

How often do we plan a research project/product, only to be surprised that plagiarism, unoriginality, and lack of application to real-life has resulted in the student performance?

Diversity: Do we really share 50% of an earthworm's DNA?

Diversity is not just about ecology. A curriculum that encourages the continual studying of diverse opinion, perspective, or approach should not lead to facile agreement but to respect of the wider human experience. In the many, we find both similarity and difference. No one discipline can teach the whole person.

How will 21st century classrooms reflect the diversity of experience created by the social networking, and bridge the gap between school and a student's private life?

Innovation: What does new wine in new bottles taste like?

The interdisciplinary mind combines the exploration of recurrent problems within disciplines with the searching for new solutions across disciplines. Innovation often results when you are outside your comfort zone or beyond your initial assumptions.

How often do we actually expect students to exhibit new thinking or reward them for it?

Metacognition: Do only philosophers think about thinking?

The ability to think about thinking, learn about learning, and reflect about reflecting is deliberately and daily developed in interdisciplinary approaches. Students find it initially hard but ultimately liberating. The unexamined life is rarely an interdisciplinary one.

How often do we exhibit, test, and discuss our own thinking in front of our students?