On one end, schools might employ an interdisciplinary team approach, in which teachers of different content areas assigned to one group of students who are encouraged to correlate some of their teaching.
It differs from other types of interdisciplinary teaching in that it begins with a central theme that emerges from questions or social concerns students have, without regard to subject delineations.
Essential questions help teachers chose the most important facts and concepts relative to the theme and serve to focus planning efforts.
[12] A school district in Michigan created integration plans for thematic units, based on the ideas of Howard Gardner about multiple intelligences, in a yearlong pilot program.
[4] A final benefit of interdisciplinary teaching is that students have a chance to work with multiple sources of information, thus ensuring they are receiving a more inclusive perspective than they would from consulting one textbook.
[17] As school districts often have decision-making panels that consist of stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and students, curriculum integration may take away their agency to make curricular choices.
In addition to issues of local control, truly integrated curricula may or may not prepare students for the high-stakes tests that have become a reality for most high schools around the world, depending on whether they cover the same material.
Finally, there is also concern that integrated teaching discounts the value of deep subject-specific knowledge, which is essential for specialization in areas such as medicine, law, and engineering.
[19] Research has also suggested that some students may have less capacity to cope with broad interdicisplinary curricula that spans diverse combination of subjects from different fields.