Better Late than Never - Curriclum Mapping

Curriculum mapping is an attempt to organize what is being taught throughout a child’s education. If curriculum mapping is used, some benefits would be consistency across grade levels and within school in a district. The quality of instruction may benefit as well as transitions from one grade to the next.

In my school district, to be honest, I don’t know if it uses curriculum mapping. I’m going to make a guess and say no. I have written curriculum for new courses and updated curriculum for an old course. There wasn’t a curriculum map given to me to follow. Based on experience, I created the curriculum for a particular course using the team of teachers that were assigned to develop the curriculum for that course.

In the reading, District 5 was committed to a three year time period to implement curriculum mapping. It sounded like there was a lot of planning, organizing and buy-in from teachers to implement this change in curriculum. It sounds like my current school district is similar to the way District 5 was before the demographic changes. We send almost 100 percent of our students to some type of post-secondary education (mainly college), a very small percentage of our students fail the state assessments; perhaps, because of these similarties we probably don’t use curriculum mapping. If our demographics change as they did in District 5, perhaps changes would need to be made.

I did find this interesting, “Teams of teachers were challenged to think through the mind of a child rather than with the child in mind.” By putting ourselves in the child’s shoes, perhaps our tool belt will build the next Taj Mahal.