Teacher Training Activities in Secondary School Focused on Interdisciplinarity

In this paper, we show an ongoing research project about teachers training aimed to an interdisciplinary teaching. Competencies based teaching, which include skills, knowledges, judgments and abilities, requires the removal of barriers between subjects. Nevertheless, teachers should be competent, and the learning planning have to be coherent to support a synergy between all the disciplines. We inquire if it is possible to have a teacher training based on interdisciplinarity; which are main characteristics of this innovative training and if this training improves students’ competencies, too. Our main idea is to start by analysing different methodologies, used in the different subjects training, so that a suitable methodology and/or a combination of them may be chosen by the teachers to plan and experiment an interdisciplinary learning unit with their students. The experimentation has been realized at a High School in Campania, in south of Italy. 92 teachers have been involved in this experimentation, which are teaching different subjects. The project was carried out in five steps. In the first step, Mathematics researchers of University of Salerno, teachers and the headmasters school analyze the teacher training needs; the second step, consisted in seminars with practical activities, about innovative methodologies: Inquiry Based Science Education, Scrum, Role Playing, Digital Storytelling, Flipped Classroom. Some interdisciplinary learning units have been co-planned by teachers together with researchers, too. In the third step, teachers have been motivated to implement in their own classrooms some of the co-planned activities, choosing the methodologies they believe to be more suitable for their purpose, and the researchers observed the teaching phases. In a final debate, as a fourth step, researchers show the results of their observation and analysis of a final teachers Questionnaire, whereas the teachers discussed about their experimentation in the classrooms. Both teachers and researchers co-planned new learning interdisciplinary units to be experimented in the classrooms. Future activity is to evaluate the impact of the outcomes in the students. In these training-learning-teaching phases, through a meta-didactic transposition, praxeologies between teachers and researchers and between teachers of different subjects have been shared. Our research questions are "may the meta-didactic transposition, through the praxeologies sharing, give rise to a more effective Mathematics teaching-learning?