The purpose of this collaborative study is to design a transformation system in which school teachers read academic literature as a way of materials study; they learn a researcher’s learning process by reading his/her research articles/books; and they apply their findings to lesson planning. In particular, the present study focuses on a lesson for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) collaboratively developed by social studies and English teachers in order to carry out cross-curricular lesson planning at the elementary school level.
First, a social studies teacher and an English teacher individually planned a lesson based on the activities by Floyd Wilfred Schmoe as a common case and later studied a book about his work as a common ground for collaborative materials development. Here they read the book about Schmoe’s Houses for Hiroshima Projects and learned the process and structure of how to turn professional researchers’ learning to learners’ learning. Then the authors developed a CLIL lesson together and showed its design process. This materials development study shows the process of CLIL lesson planning and by doing so, it showed a teachers’ learning process in cross-curricular lesson planning ranging from reading articles/books, materials study, and lesson planning.
There are three findings from this study:
(1) Understanding the structure of researchers’ learning process can be utilized in the process of materials study and lesson planning in cross-curricular lesson planning in the elementary school.
(2) Although it is possible to apply and use the structure of researchers’ learning found in their articles/books, findings should be adapted to the children’s developmental stages and learning environment. It is important to make sure that the developed cross-curricular lesson should provide effective materials to both subjects.
(3) Important things in reading articles/books as materials study are:
1) to identify the structure of the target articles/books
2) to identify the key concepts of the resource materials and see if those concepts can be used as a core in lesson planning
3) to consider if the developed materials/lessons are appropriate for children in elementary school