Nurturing interdisciplinary practice in small secondary schools

Abstract This paper reports on the perspectives and operational practices of teachers implementing interdisciplinary units in five International Baccalaureate schools in Norway and Denmark with fewer than 100 students in their Middle Years Programme. The results help explain why interdisciplinary practice in secondary schools is relatively rare. The collaborative process of developing unique school-based interdisciplinary units, as required in each year of the program, was consistently valued by teachers, but no administration recognized the impact on their workload. On average, teachers estimated that over 17 hours were required to design and evaluate an interdisciplinary unit, and a further seven hours were required to assess and moderate student reflections. On average, schools allocated three hours of collaborative planning for this task. Small schools are uniquely enabled to offset some of the complexities of interdisciplinary practice that frustrate larger schools. In the interests of nurturing consensus cultures that support their interdisciplinary practice, the results indicate small schools should allocate additional collaborative planning time, organize teaching schedules around the interdisciplinary subject linkages, pair teachers in shared workspaces, and offer teachers involved in interdisciplinary unit implementation greater flexibility to attend staff meetings.


PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
This paper reports on the perspectives and practices of teachers implementing interdisciplinary units in five International Baccalaureate schools with fewer than 100 students in their Middle Years Programme (for students aged 11-16).
Although interdisciplinary units were valued for the contributions they made to student learning, and rewarding for teachers to create, school administrations consistently underestimated the amount of time teachers needed to plan and implement them, and to assess the students' outcomes and reflections.
Small schools are uniquely placed to offset some of the challenges that frustrate interdisciplinary practice in larger schools.The results of this limited study suggested small schools could allocate additional collaborative planning time, organize teaching schedules so teachers involved had common times when they were released from their teaching schedules, pair teachers in shared workspaces, and offer the teachers involved in interdisciplinary implementation greater flexibility to attend staff meetings.

Introduction
Over the past 40 years, global power shifts in ownership and control over curriculum change have shifted from local, teacher-generated solutions towards external, commercial, and political players (Goodson, 2014, p. 63;Wahlström et al., 2017).Goodson suggests that the period for classroomled "invention" (innovation) peaked between the post war period up to the 1970s, when teachers had "large amounts of professional autonomy" (Goodson, 2014, p. 769).Externally imposed curriculum change, however, is unlikely to be sustainable unless it aligned with "teacher's professional beliefs and . . .own personal missions" (Goodson, 2014, p. 776), resulting in cyclic shifts in the control of educational processes in the classroom.Goodson's observations appear prescient when the International Commission on the Futures of Education (UNESCO, 2021) and the 2030 Project (OECD, 2020) recommend that schools engage with their communities to develop authentic approaches and interdisciplinary curricula.
An existing model for this educational future may be found in community schools that offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP).The IB was founded in 1968, when according to Goodson (2014), teachers were at the zenith of their professional autonomy.The organisation's mission statement (IBO, n.d.-b) captures the egalitarian, aspirational ideals of this period, and it continues to sustain the professional responsibility of IB teachers to engage students in meaningful action.As a disciplinary framework for students aged 11-16 (IB, 2020b), every aspect of MYP implementation requires a high degree of "teacher input and interpretation in curriculum design" (M. Lee et al., 2012, p. 29).The program includes an additional curriculum requirement that all students engage with "compelling issues, ideas, and challenges" (IBO, 2014a, p. 12) via interdisciplinary units (IDUs) implemented at least annually during each year the school offers the program.IDUs are examples of curriculum innovations because each is unique to the context of its school, and is designed by their teachers.
Teachers' responses to innovation are mediated by the leadership and social structures of their schools (Bonner et al., 2020;Jenkins, 2019;Pantić et al., 2021).Their engagement with curriculum change is focussed on students and closely linked to their contextual experience (Bellibaş et al., 2020;Bonner et al., 2020;Pantić et al., 2021).Teachers are likely to sustain an innovation if they have opportunities to evaluate its positive impact on student learning and engagement (Bonner et al., 2020;Jenkins, 2019;Pantić et al., 2021).Conversely, resistance is also a form of teacher agency (Bellibaş et al., 2020;Dickson et al., 2020a;Minni et al., 2018).Factors that provoke agentic resistance include job intensity, workload, or a perceived lack of trust (Jenkins, 2019).
Small, isolated international schools delivering high-quality curricula expose these leadership dilemmas.An extensive literature on the professional cultures of effective schooling confirms the significant contribution of learner-centered relationships, teacher leadership, and trust between the network of stakeholders, staff, students, and the community (Bellibaş et al., 2020;Bryk & Schneider, 2003;Donohoo, 2017;Flood & Angelle, 2017).The ability of principals to recruit and retain staff is known to be interdependent with the professional cultures in their schools, where "rewards . . .outweigh the frustrations" (Rosenholtz, 1985, p. 335).In thriving communities, formal and informal conversations focus on effective teaching and concrete learning outcomes, and "friendship and work tend[. ..] to overlap" (Rosenholtz, 1985, p. 336).The extent to which collaborative, consensus cultures can be deliberately replicated in small, isolated, international schools is tempered by their micropolitics, geography, and the impact of succession (Caffyn, 2010).
In international contexts, teachers are likely to be itinerants, marketing themselves as innovation enthusiasts (Blackmore, 2014), "motivated by the prospect of global travel, . . .and a possible escape route from their own national system" (Cambridge, 2002, p. 139).Although the impact of turnover among expatriate staff may be countered by recruiting those who are already familiar with the curriculum (M. Lee et al., 2012), and by using documented norms and a common language for professional dialogue (Bryant et al., 2018;Caffyn, 2010), replacing teachers who are deeply conversant in one or more disciplines has challenges.In Scandinavia, where MYP friskoler ("accredited schools") frequently serve fewer than 100 students, teachers often carry the singular responsibility for the multiple strata of preparation, risk management and assessment design involved in their discipline(s).In these schools, staff burnout and turnover are constant threats (Gibb, 2014).

Interdisciplinary teaching in schools with disciplinary paradigms
The middle schooling tradition has long advocated the advantages of interdisciplinary approaches and small cohort size for connecting adolescents to socially relatable, relevant learning (Haller et al., 1993;Jacobs, 1989; V. E. Lee & Smith, 1995;Raywid, 1997).While the gains of interdisciplinary approaches in secondary schools continue to be upheld (McPhail, 2018;Pluim et al., 2020), disciplinary approaches largely remain the norm (Venville et al., 2008).
Because this study is situated in MYP schools of sizes comparable to those recommended for middle schools (Ellerbrock et al., 2018) but which retain the disciplinary organisational structures typically found in secondary schools, the results have potential to provide insight into two perspectives on interdisciplinary teaching.

A sociological perspective
A comparison of organizational structures suggested power relationships and alliances between leaders, classroom teachers and students are reversed in schools with highly classified curricula, compared to those with "integrated codes" (Bernstein, 1971, p. 62).In schools with highly classified curricula, for example, those offering senior secondary courses that were assessed using external examinations, leaders had strong relationships with each other, but were insulated from classroom teachers and students, who were also insulated from each other.In schools that offered "integrated codes," of which the MYP is a suggested example (Cambridge, 2012, p. 51), senior staff had weak relationships and alliances with each other, but strong horizontal relationships with classroom teachers and with students, and the relationships and alliances between the latter were also strong.According to Bernstein, curriculum reforms fail because they threaten to disturb power relationships and disciplinary identities (Bernstein, 1971, pp. 62-67).
In schools so small that each faculty is represented by an individual teacher, who may additionally hold an administrative or leadership role as coordinator or principal, the organisational power relationships described by Bernstein are likely to be less evident.The unifying, moral authority of the IB's mission statement (IBO, n.d.-b), the MYP's conceptual framework and its prescribed disciplinary and interdisciplinary assessment rubrics (IBO, 2014a) exemplify an "explicit consensus" around ideological practice, evaluation and collection codes (Bernstein, 1971, pp. 63-66;Garcia-Huidobro, 2018, p. 35).From this perspective, small MYP schools theoretically have structural and curriculum advantages that favor sustainable curriculum innovation, as represented by IDUs.

Pragmatic perspectives
Implementation barriers to subject integration in junior secondary schools include the nature of the curriculum, resourcing, and logistics.The MYP is a non-prescriptive curriculum framework that relies on teacher agency for context and assessment design (Sperandio, 2010).In three Australian schools that had discontinued the MYP, teachers cited stress, lack of time, confidence, resources, and curriculum development opportunities as concerns (Dickson et al., 2020b).These inhibitors closely matched those cited in a longitudinal study of nine independent middle schools in West Australia (Wallace et al., 2007) where teachers in half of the schools reported excessive teacher workloads or pressure to teach "out of field" as concerns.More than one school cited a lack of resources, planning time or high staff turnover as additional challenges.After ten years, the schools that continued to offer integrated curricula had all reduced their scope, for example, by involving fewer subjects, fewer or younger year cohorts, or by offering integrated units as elective courses.
When work demands become extreme, teachers substitute their ingenuity with externally prepared resources."Interviewed teachers highlighted the constant tussle between the forces for a more subject discipline-based approach" (Wallace et al., 2007, p. 46).A lack of pre-existing, externally prepared resources has prevented the uptake of integrated approaches in Romania (Constantin & Goga, 2019).Conversely, the availability of resources may facilitate the uptake of integrated curricula, as observed in the rise of STEM education (Paige & Hardy, 2019;Ring et al., 2017).From this perspective, teachers in small MYP schools are likely to face challenges in implementing integrated units as well as disciplinary courses.

Research questions
If teachers' perspectives and operational practice are vital for sustaining "interdisciplinary innovation", then the findings of this study may illustrate how a balance of professional rewards and operational challenges can be realized by small schools, defined as having fewer than 100 students, by addressing the following questions.
(1) How much planning, collaboration, and assessment time is involved in IDU implementation?
(3) What operational practices facilitate the implementation of IDUs?

Materials and methods
These data were derived from a limited, mixed-methods study of the lived experiences of teachers in English-medium MYP friskoler in Denmark and Norway, conducted during the COVID−19 pandemic.All 39 MYP schools in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden listed on the IB website (IBO, n.d.-a) were approached between August 2020 and April 2021.Heads of five schools, four in Norway and one in Denmark, agreed to their organization contributing to the research.Their MYP teachers were invited to participate in a voluntary, anonymous survey, and/or share their perspectives in a semi-structured interview.All these schools offered the MYP for four or five years to fewer than 100 MYP students.This paper, which takes as its focus the operational perspectives and practices of teachers with direct experience implementing interdisciplinary units in Scandinavian MYP friskoler, reports all the relevant data collected from these two components of the study.
The first, quantitative component of the method concerns the responses of teachers to a voluntary, anonymous Qualtrics survey link forwarded by their school's MYP Coordinator.The entire survey captured thirty-six responses, suggesting it was completed by most of the MYP teachers at the four schools that elected to participate, but the operational focus of this paper means only data from the teachers with direct, personal experience of IDU implementation in the special context of MYP friskoler could be included.
Because every IDU represents a bespoke grouping of MYP subjects or subject groups, conceptual framing, and student performance outcomes (IBO, 2014a), the survey respondents were offered a range of time intervals. 1To aggregate these data, an intermediate figure was determined for each category (for example, the 2-5-hour category was averaged to 3.5 hours).One data item, 'more than 10 hours` was assigned a range of "11_20," to enable its inclusion in the aggregation.
The second, qualitative component of the study sought perspectives from teachers.Due to the impact of the COVID−19 pandemic, only one school head initially consented to their teachers' participation in semi-structured interviews. 2 However, an on-line presentation of the study's preliminary findings in Norway 3 motivated teachers in two additional schools, one of which had also participated in the survey, to be interviewed.All nine teachers in this component of the study met the inclusion criterion of being experienced IDU practitioners in the context of the study.
The nine participants, who represented experience from all eight MYP subject groups, provided detailed insight into a range of operational practices in three Norwegian MYP schools.Their interviews were recorded on Zoom, and the audio recordings were manually transcribed by the researcher.After the participants had had the opportunity to approve and correct typed copies, the transcripts were thematically coded on NVivo by using a domain summary approach initially driven by the collection questions (Virginia Braun et al., 2019).The data were then sub-coded inductively before being organised into the recurring themes, several of which corroborated the quantitative data.

Administrative requirements of IDU implementation
Only the fraction of the survey participants (55%) with direct experience implementing IDUs in the context of this study are reported here.
Table 1, aggregating responses from 19 or 20 teachers experienced in implementing IDUs in three Norwegian and one Danish friskoler, reveals a large discrepancy between the average allocated hours and actual number of hours teachers estimated were needed to design and evaluate an IDU.Although there was a wide variation in all time categories of implementation, on average, schools provided just over three hours specifically for IDU planning, but teachers estimated over 12 hours were needed to design and plan an IDU and a further five hours were needed to evaluate the unit on completion, including documenting these processes.On average, teachers in this sample needed at least five times the number of hours than had been allocated by their schools.While it could be argued that planning for recurrent IDUs was likely to be limited to aligning pedagogies, that view overlooks the impact of changing staff.Only the averaged unit   evaluation time, five hours, approached the averaged collaborative planning time schools specifically allocated for IDU implementation.
Table 2 presents the impact of IDUs on teaching time and the time required for teachers to mark the assessment component for a class.Performance assessments for IDUs typically involve a synergistic product and a reflective report from each student (IBO, 2014a).The assessment of IDU reflective writing adds to teachers' annual disciplinary assessment requirements, and it provides important evidence that staff in small MYP schools participate in internal moderation processes (IBO, 2014b), for which opportunities can be limited when individual teachers are often solely responsible for the assessment of their discipline.No school awarded more than five hours of class time to students to report their IDU reflections, which may represent a week of scheduled lesson time from the two participating subjects.Three teachers reported that the allocated class time was insufficient for their students to complete this task at their school.On average, teachers estimated that seven hours were needed to evaluate a class of student work, but this varied, as might be expected when each IDU represented a unique curriculum innovation.

Professional perspectives on IDU implementation
Table 3 summarizes the coded interview data provided by nine teachers from three of the Norwegian MYP schools.The coded interview fragments were assigned non-exclusively to three broad categories-planning, pedagogy, and leadership.

Planning
4.2.1.1.Collegiality.Every teacher cited positive experiences associated with collaborative planning, creating, or adapting the IDUs for new student cohorts."Searching for these connections . . .[provides insight into] your own subjects," (Teacher 4)."My own teaching range [was extended] in areas . . .new to me," (Teacher 3).As reported in other studies of teacher agency in curriculum (Bonner et al., 2020;King & Nomikou, 2018), confidence and skills evolved with practice."I am much more relaxed . . .now, the first IDU I was quite stressed about," (Teacher 1); "We have to make some mistakes to get it right," (Teacher 5) and " . . .I'm pretty used to creating these sorts of open projects now," (Teacher 8).
Communication relies on teacher efficacy (Bonner et al., 2020).When every discipline is "a oneman show," (Teacher 7), teachers are sensitive to disciplinary synergies and their potential for inclusion in IDUs."It is very natural . . . to work together, [because] we have made everything ourselves from scratch," (Teacher 4).Subjects or disciplines that were advocated by colleagues with less MYP experience risked "a natural kind of power imbalance," (Teacher 5).These concerns are characteristic of consensus cultures in highly effective schools (Rosenholtz, 1985)."All of the people I work with . . .we care about our profession and our job, and so, usually, when we are talking, that is . . .how ideas . . . .come up," (Teacher 7), and "all the teachers involved are willing . . .do this kind of work.Because we are seeing that the [Approaches to Learning] ATL approach and team management and project work, is very useful for the students," (Teacher 8).
In contrast to the rewards of collaborative planning, nearly every MYP teacher corroborated the survey data (Tables 1,2) by expressing concern about the administrative demands involved in IDU implementation.Because the time required was barely recognized by schools, "We have to find it ourselves . . .we do not have any assigned meeting time as such," (Teacher 5)."There is lacking a framework and time allowance to do so. . . .So, we have had to take time outside of lessons," (Teacher 8).

Implementation.
IDUs were dynamic, changing with each iteration."You always have to adjust it for the students you have," (Teacher 1) whether for the cohort or by differentiating the task for individual students.Adjustments included introducing new resources or realigning the IDU to the requirements of an annual international competition.In all schools, IDUs linked to • Learning to identify connections and synergies between disciplines prepared students for their MYP Personal Project (completed in MYP 5), the Diploma Programme, and future, innovative careers.
• Bridging disciplinary content using conceptual connections helped students develop abstract thinking.
• Although reflection supported interdisciplinary learning, it was time consuming, and for younger students, overly bureaucratic.

Challenges
• Supporting younger students' reflective writing "without spelling it out for them".
A teacher-directed "Interdisciplinary Week" enabled one school to realise its IB interdisciplinary assessment requirements.
Separate, longer, open ended, complex projects enabled students to develop motivational, team management and "lifeskills".
Student responses (reported by teachers) • Students were more open to learning during formative stages of projects.Freedom of expression was controlled within parameters of narrow frameworks or firm boundaries.
(Continued) • Release teachers participating in interdisciplinary units from formal meetings during peak implementation times (e.g., moderation of student work).
• In each year cohort, common non-teaching periods needed to be prioritised for teachers implementing interdisciplinary units in small schools.

Empathy
• Understanding the unique demands of interdisciplinary work needed personal experience.If collaborative time was not perceived to be used effectively, this merited investigation.
excursions were cancelled or otherwise affected by the COVID−19 pandemic.Occasionally, this impact was positive.One teacher reported "some really good alternative opportunities. . . .even if we were to go back to that trip to Berlin, . . .we will keep doing these new ideas," (Teacher 7).As changes continually required collaboration and dialogue, implementing IDUs was more demanding for teachers compared to adjusting their disciplinary units.
Assessing performance outcomes introduced further tensions, "because you should really do it together," (Teacher 1), or " . . . the assessment part for that, that takes extra time, so be conscious of that . . . . to have a meeting kind of thing."(Teacher 7).One school, which managed their MYPmandated IDU student reflections within an "Interdisciplinary Week", separately introduced longer, project-based team work to develop students' Approaches to Learning (skills).To assess " . . .students properly, or sometimes, even fairly, because they are doing different tasks," (Teacher 8), the school ultimately focussed assessment using the synthesis rubric in which students needed to show how the subjects involved worked together.
The importance of documented norms (Caffyn, 2010) was acknowledged by participants."This system, yes, it's very bureaucratic, lots of paperwork, and there's lots of planning, but other than that, I think it works pretty well," (Teacher 4).Several others considered it a distraction."I think the biggest challenge of the IDU is all the documentation . . . it is out of proportion with the actual teaching . . .." (Teacher 1).

Approaches to Learning.
Participants consistently recognized linkages between the need for students to articulate the development of their skills in IDUs to prepare them for their Personal Projects, the culminating task of the MYP 5, and for IB programs designed for older students (IBO, n.d.-c).Teacher 8 was prescient about the role of innovation in future learning.to me, no subject is really distinct . . .so in the real world . . . in future . . . the innovative thinking of taking something from a traditional area and transferring it to another subject is . . .going to happen.So, this is kind of where training them to see connections is where they further themselves.
The value of reflection for developing metacognition was also recognized by several respondents."They are basically learning how to expand their mind a little bit and maybe it also helps them develop abstract thinking, and develop their interdisciplinary appreciation, really, or an application for their subject," (Teacher 3).I think they got a lot out of it . . .they realize that it is a very transparent connection between the two classes, and it is an excellent opportunity for . . .serving another purpose, and I think they are understanding that a little bit better.It serves almost an emotional catharsis, sort of a need for them, as they are grappling through issues of the Holocaust.Right?So instead of just teaching that unit in a more traditional sense, there is that component to it that we are using to give them a chance to reflect a lot more on the learning of that unit.(Teacher 7) 4.2.2.2.Challenges.Formative work, "when [students] are open for change during their way of working, or open to learning new things," (Teacher 8) was contrasted to their motivation after they had submitted their IDU product, when "they are sort of finished," (Teacher 8).Because metacognitive strategies needed for reflection improve with age (Flavell, 1979;Kuhn, 1999;Moshman, 2018;Weinstein & Mayer, 1986), teachers of younger MYP students sometimes referred to this summative component as "a killjoy," (Teacher 1), and recognized students completed the task poorly "because they can't transfer the knowledge that they needed to," (Teacher 2) or "it kind of twists [their experience] actually, their opinion [is] based on the fact they have to make that document, I have seen that a few times."(Teacher 4).
Generally, the submission of IDU products preceded the period in which students completed their summative reflections.Therefore, some teachers recommended journaling."After every music lesson now, I have the students write a reflection in their book, based on a few scaffolding questions.So, they will have this as a weekly habit," (Teacher 5).This focus on process was linked to "life lessons," (Teacher 2) and the authentic contexts of IDUs.

Student responses (reported by teachers).
Typically, IDU products require open ended responses from students and are designed to enable them to express their personal interests.Teachers' perspectives of student engagement were informed by their students' products and their reflective reports, the holistic assessments completed at the conclusion of each IDU."There's no constraints for them . . ., unless they want to come up and say, 'I don't want to do it at all.'" (Teacher 7)."The end products that we got from them and how they arrived at that did vary quite a lot. . . .The nature of the unit that we constructed was to give a lot of time . . .where the kids could work independently," (Teacher 3).Representatives of different subject groups from different schools used strikingly similar language to describe how such open-ended approaches were tightly directed."I give the students a very narrow frame, with a few tools . . .that is [their] playground," (Teacher 5)."I have some control of the limitations, the borders of this, and within those borders, the students are pretty much free to do what they want," (Teacher 8).

Leadership
4.2.3.1.Operations.Shared staffrooms enabled professional dialogue that incorporated perspectives from multiple disciplines."The guy I am collaborating with I sit right across the desk from . . . .It is organic, natural, and that is the way I work best."(Teacher 7).The advantage of small schools over larger schools, with their physical division of teachers into classrooms and departments, isolating them from opportunities to recognize their work as part of a collective enterprise (Rosenholtz, 1985) may also be countered by " . . .having collaborative tools.We are a Google school . . .so we do not have to be in the same spot," (Teacher 8).At least one interviewee in Wallace et al. (2007) study identified dedicated planning space for teachers as an important enabler of integration.
As with larger junior secondary schools, small MYP schools operate with fixed disciplinary teaching schedules.In an IDU that combined STEM subjects, the observation "there have not been any lessons where we`re both in planning time," (Teacher 8) suggested that prioritizing schedules to provide teachers participating in IDUs with common non-contact periods (lessons) acknowledges the importance teachers assign to this work.Several teachers valued ad hoc opportunities for administration during times they were not in contact with students." . . . .We did request that time . . .[and] it was actually taken out of our meeting time," (Teacher 1).
IDUs may occur during any part of the annual teaching cycle, but two schools recommended implementing them at the beginning of the second semester, when the disciplinary assessment of the prescribed holistic MYP assessment criteria in most subjects was likely to have been completed at least once.Three teachers cited examples of whole-school planning approaches that consolidated the practice " . . . to get everything . . .ready for authorization," (Teacher 4) or investing, annually, "quite a lot of time . . .[in] staff meetings and after school meetings, to . . .set the framework," (Teacher 8).One school scheduled "collaborative planning time in small groups, at least once or twice a week, to share ideas," (Teacher 9) and believed this arrangement actively supported the teachers involved in IDUs.

Empathy.
Empathetic leadership was crucial for the sustainability of curriculum integration in small, independent Western Australian schools.Examples of administrative support included resourcing, program coordination, and encouragement (Wallace et al., 2007).In this study at least one interviewed teacher recommended "people sitting in key positions need to experience what IDUs are," (Teacher 7).However, two of the interviewed teachers had additional leadership roles at their schools.Both suggested the challenges their colleagues consistently voiced regarding IDU implementation related to poor organization."I think teachers are really, really, bad at time management, to be quite honest, when it comes to planning.Because there's so many other, nice things to do," (Teacher 2).

Discussion and conclusion
If an approach to curriculum is widely believed to have value, but is rare or ephemeral in practice (Ellerbrock et al., 2018;Venville et al., 2008), the pragmatic resolution is to identify and adopt operational enablers.These include respectful collegial relations, supportive leadership, openminded communities, flexibility, and access to collaborative planning time (Dickson et al. 2020a;Sperandio, 2010;Wallace et al., 2007), expectations that broadly concur with the professional contexts of small MYP friskoler in Denmark and Norway.The teachers who participated in the semistructured interviews could all be described as "enthusiasts" (Wallace et al., 2007, p. 36) of interdisciplinary learning.One participant reported that their school was developing an interdisciplinary focus, requiring dedicated in-service days and frequent attention during staff meetings.
Consistent limitations of these data are that the number of participants is small, and their contributions are self-selected.The staffing structure of small MYP schools is relatively simple.These schools employ approximately ten teachers to deliver the MYP.Although only a proportion of the participants had experience suitable for their inclusion of the report, it is estimated that 90% MYP teachers in four schools responded to the voluntary survey, a level of engagement the suggested the participating schools all had cohesive, professional cultures.The quantitative and qualitative narratives were also consistent across the five similar schools, and broadly concur with the findings of a qualitative study based in Singapore, for which 11 teachers were interviewed (Lam et al., 2013).Although set in larger schools, this study also identified teachers as the key to the success of integrated practice, and recommended a need to extend their investigations in scale.
Issues of resourcing and conflicts between disciplinary and interdisciplinary assessment demands are common to all secondary schools that seek to introduce curriculum innovation (Lam et al., 2013;McDowall & Hipkins, 2019;Venville et al., 2008), but the small MYP schools of this study have unique social and administrative characteristics.A recognition of the findings for each of the research questions below, informed by the aggregated perspectives of teachers in similar schools, acknowledges that schools are collaborative enterprises, and that the role of teachers for sustaining interdisciplinary practice is vital.
(1) The hours required to plan, collaborate, and assess integrated units alone provide an explanation for the rarity of integrated practice in schools that are organised into disciplinary matrices.The averaged quantitative data (Table 1) revealed that there was at least a five-fold discrepancy between the time allocated (3.2 h) and required (17.7 h) for collaborative planning.These estimates did not consider the additional assessment and reporting requirements (7.1 h) of IDUs (Table 2).The qualitative data, representing the perspectives of teachers from all eight MYP disciplines, elaborate on the need for teachers to engage in continual dialogue during the maintenance and assessment of IDU implementation, sometimes in contrast to their experience and expectations of teaching traditional units.
If schools value progressive, integrated practice, increasing the time dedicated for IDU implementation within schools' collaborative planning schedule can address the discrepancy.
(2) No teacher in this limited study failed to identify a range of positive experiences associated with the collegial enterprise of IDU implementation, including creative planning, professional growth, and student engagement and learning (Table 3).Their rich experiences are proactive and constructive examples of the reclamation of classroom teachers' agentic roles as "inventors" of activities that connect disciplinary learning with students' local contexts (Goodson, 2014).The results of this study concurred with findings from New Zealand, where the national curriculum also advocates curriculum integration, and three quarters of principals and teachers reported their experiences were successful and positive (McDowall & Hipkins, 2019, pp. 13-16).
If schools enable teachers to implement unique, authentic school-based opportunities for learning, their curriculum design principles align with those of the OECD's Education 2030 Project (OECD, 2020).Nurturing personalized, process oriented IDUs, connected to their communities, places small IB MYP friskoler at the cutting edge of advocated practice.
(3) Administrators of small schools have operational opportunities to facilitate interdisciplinary practices which may elude larger schools.These include the sociological context of relatively horizontal staffing structures (Bernstein, 1971), the pragmatic realities of simpler scheduling, and the provision of shared staff rooms for teachers who represent multiple disciplines.This potentially provides greater flexibility in supporting teachers' access to collaborative planning time through timetable scheduling and occasional release from competing administrative duties to enable participants to address peak demands of IDU implementation, such as internal moderation of assessment.If the perception that full-time classroom teachers in these small schools are not accessing their scheduled collaborative IDU planning time is real, then leaders, cognisant of their social power within their school's organizational structure, are advised to explore the inhibitors of their teachers' effective transition from their classrooms to meetings non-judgementally.
The role of leadership in MYP schools is to promote and enable the curriculum.Interdisciplinary components (Daly et al., 2012;Robertson, 2011) should be included in whole program curriculum planning.Staffroom seating arrangements and access to breakout spaces acknowledge that professional dialogue is essential for effective IDU implementation.Providing occasional, additional release time is likely to translate to the absence of two teachers from one or two weekly meetings each year, unless the school is implementing more than one IDU concurrently.
Small, isolated schools can offer high quality, teacher-driven education to their communities, but this is dependent on the efficacy of their staff.Constant acknowledgement that teachers engaged in IDU implementation do additional work, recognizes this is valued.The strategies suggested in response to the research findings situated in small MYP friskoler can deliver minutes and hours to offset some of the workload discrepancies.Nurturing interdisciplinary practice in vulnerable international schools has the potential to contribute to staff stability and elicit deeper commitments from teachers, ultimately benefiting the education of their students.
(a) Students: time allocated to IDU assessment in class Time interval selected (hEach question provided a selection of time categories in a drop-down box.Only the time intervals that had one or more responses are shown.

Table 1 . Allocated IDU planning time and reported IDU planning time Allocated collaborative IDU planning time provided by schools
Each question provided a selection of time intervals in a drop-down box.Only the time intervals that had one or more responses are shown.