Chapter 18: Cultivating Ambitious Practices: An Interdisciplinary Methods Model

The Cultivating Ambitious Practices (CAP) model for interdisciplinary methods courses is less a task than a framework for advancing high-leverage teaching practices via two-week cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and reflection.

Our conversations about shared aims in teacher education led us to develop an interdisciplinary methods course—the second in a two-course sequence—for teacher candidates in our social studies and ELA teacher education programs. We have two overarching goals: (1) to expand dialogues about learning, teaching, and their inherent dilemmas (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001); and (2) to help candidates adapt the theoretical and practical foundations from their initial domain-specific methods courses to specific instructional activities in their fields. To select those instructional activities, we drew from the growing base of scholarship on high-leverage teaching practices, which allow novice teachers to better understand how students learn, reveal the complexities of disciplinary thought and activity, are warranted by research, and can be enacted across curricular contexts (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009).