How Do I Create a Curriculum Map?
Curriculum mapping is an effective way to plot out learning for a semester, or for an entire school year. Developed in collaboration with colleagues, curriculum mapping creates an important cohesiveness that leads to effective teaching and learning. A solid curriculum is the backbone of an empowered community of learners, because everyone works and learns together. What better way to nurture a community of learners than through curriculum mapping?
Instructions
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Look at the calendar and amount of time you want to cover in the mapping period, along with the academic requirements. If it is the entire school year, get out the school academic calendar. If a semester, look only at the semester requirements.
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Develop a template to fill in with all the curriculum detail. Create five columns. Head each column up with the following: "State Standard," "Content," "Skills," "Activities/Learning Strategies," "Assessments."
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Locate the applicable state standard or standards that support the content that needs to be taught, or to identify what to teach first. Write the applicable state standard in the "State Standard" column.
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Write in the content that will be taught in the "Content" column. If it is science, write in the name of the unit, chapter of text or theme. For example: "Amphibian Anatomy, Chapter 5, p. xxx." Or "Biomes Research Project, webquest no. 5."
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Write in the skills students will learn in the "Skills" column. Begin each one with an action verb, since a skill is something they do and practice with. For example, "explain," "compare," "contrast," "evaluate."
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Write in the activities that will teach the skills that students will learn, or the strategies they will be taught to learn it. For example, if students are in a unit on Earth Science, and learning about new environmental legislation, a strategy might be, "Develop ecosystem diagrams," with an activity of, "Sample water from a local stream for environmental pollutants." The testing kit used would be placed in parenthesis, as would any text or material and resources used to perform the activity.
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Write in the assessments, or methods of evaluation, in the "Assessment" column. Include tests, quizzes, observations, rubrics used, state standardized tests or portfolio assessments.
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Tips & Warnings
Review the assessments time period. Be sure to align the teaching of specific assessment to coincide with what students will be tested on.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Thumbtack in a map image by Nikolay Okhitin from Fotolia.com
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Comments
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So this is basically like a lesson plan? Except for librarians like myself, we are collaborating with teachers to create this. The only problem I see with this is that most librarians run a flexible schedule and we "teach on the fly" depending on the teacher/student needs. I can see, however, how it would be useful if I wanted to schedule in all seventh graders, for example to teach them how to cite sources or all sixth graders to teach them how to use an almanac, then this would be beneficial. Again, though, for big projects I don't think this would work out too well.
