Reply to Why do one teacher have to teach four courses in elementary school?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]ELA, Math, science and Social study, that's a lot, isn't it?[/quote]

It's pretty standard. Or sometimes they have one teacher do math and science and another do ELA and social studies.[/quote]

Yes, departmentalizing makes planning and prepping easier. With the new ELA curriculum it will be much harder for grade levels to departmentalize because each ELA block needs to be 2 hours uninterrupted, and while it’s easy to make that happen once per day, it’s not easy to make that time block happen twice per day in any given grade level. There are pros and cons to departmentalizing, but as a teacher I’ve seen more pros than cons. [/quote]

Of course you do. Departmentalizing IS the most teacher friendly. But it isn’t the most student-friendly, at least for the kid that struggles the most with building connections and trust. Who’s tracking any issues that the kid is having across the day? Who is building that positive relationship with the family? And  you really think it’s developmentally appropriate for 7 year olds to be switching classes all day for academic subjects?

From a curriculum standpoint, it’s difficult to do any type of cross curricular project based learning.

I’ve been a public school educator for almost 30 years. I’ve mostly taught the upper elementary grades. I’ve done both departmentalized and self-contained classrooms. While departmentalized was easier on me, there was no real classroom community. I hated how some kids fell through the cracks. [/quote]

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