As a primary school teacher, I felt it only appropriate to draw a large, gaudy, multi-coloured map to show my interpersonal and professional interdisciplinary connections. It would have been even better if I'd had a huge piece of paper and whiteboard markers - yes, whiteboard markers, because no-one ever remembers the  vivids, so we suck every bit of ink out of the poor old whiteboard markers - and then ideally I would have blu tacked the map onto a window when I'm done.
After all, this is how we roll at primary. We love to arrow our connections and talk about who's going to do what. We like to leave it up for a while and let it percolate. When mind mapping we will even alter the size and thickness of our arrows to show the strength and importance of those connections. My map shows my interpersonal as well as interdisciplinary connections, for two good reasons: Firstly, at primary level we are in the fortunate position of almost always teaching in an interdisciplinary fashion. Professionally, we share ideas, expertise, resources, offer advice - 'buddy up'. The content of our programmes reflects a desire to marry ideas, to build knowledge bridges and strengthen concepts. Having discussed these notions with our secondary colleagues, it is clear they are frustrated by the inability to integrate their subject areas. The motivation to do so is strong, but the practicalities  of planning and in particular, assessment, make it nearly impossible; Secondly, the whakatauki 'He tangata, he tangata, he tangata - 'tis people,'tis people, 'tis people' is so important in schools. I don't see myself as just Me. I'm a collection of mes, as evidenced in my graphic, but I'd be nobody without my people. I value every connection I have within this wonderful web of  people. I would like to think I am valued also.

From my interdisciplinary map, I am choosing my ILE CoP group to expand upon my near future plan. As I reported on in my first blog, we are a group of 3 experienced teachers coming together in a new build ILE next year. We will be delivering an integrated curriculum. STEAM has been our main driver. Although we will have our own guardian classes, our 90 students will be flexibly grouped across all learning experiences.

The power of interdisciplinary programmes such as STEAM are well documented. In Week 2 of our Mindlab journey we were introduced to the 21CLD rubrics. We learned that for students to truly construct knowledge, they should have learning goals in more than one academic subject and in real life problems. I found the TIP curriculum, as documented in this Road to Success clip really motivating. The idea that when students view real life problems within a multi faceted programme, they are more able to transfer knowledge and view problems from a variety of perspectives, is a powerful reason why we have chosen to implement such a curriculum. Dr Deana McDonagh refers to this widening of perspectives as a broadening of one's empathic horizon by cross pollination of the ideas we form when studying a theme across different disciplines - stretching our rubber band of understanding.

Our plan for an interdisciplinary curriculum has been developing for the last few months and we meet regularly to tease out our ideas and make sure our pedagogy is strong, so that the benefits for our learners are authentic and sound. Our first step was to identify our own 'superpowers' and discuss how we saw our strengths fitting into our team curriculum. The interests and needs of our students stand side by side in this process, but of course we won't know what they are until early next year, so we wait with excitement now to start our new journey.