The national educational reform movements in the 1980s pushed for global perspectives and high-quality curricula and resulted in school-university collaborations. The university educators could benefit from public school teachers and utilized classrooms for experimentation and innovation; whereas classroom teachers and students could benefit from the research results from faculty members in the universities. As a result, Boca Raton Community Middle School was examined in this article. It was one of eight Professional Development Schools of the Genesis Academy for Teaching Excellence (GATE) in the Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Florida Atlantic University. An interdisciplinary team structure, “The Seahawk Team”, was generated in the academic year of 1996-97 to promote effective learning and teaching by designing a unit about the Caribbean region. The Cay, an adolescent novel, was used for interdisciplinary approach, with language arts as primary resource which could be a starting point for the study of mathematics, science, and social studies. Combining cultures different from that of mainstream America gave students new insight into the demographic changes in South Florida and prepared them to live in a pluralistic and interconnected world community. However, integrating an interdisciplinary thematic unit into traditional curricula also engendered a partnership between teachers and their university colleagues (Kirkwood, 1999).