Curriculum Mapping as Professional Development

Our ongoing project at Sheridan High School in Sheridan, Ark., outside Little Rock, involves mapping the school's entire curriculum so that every person involved in the educational process—students, parents, teachers, administrators, and others—can have an overview of what we teach. Part of this project, which began in the 2001–02 school year, calls for teachers from different disciplines to review each subject area's map. This enables science instructors to see where their own curriculum might coordinate with the math department's objectives, or allows English teachers to see when they might help a history teacher who has assigned a research paper. A dynamic and data-driven model of learning, curriculum mapping can replace the often unused and dusty curriculum guides on teachers' shelves.

Lesson Planning and Reflection

To ensure success for all students, schools should be committed to regular planning of and reflection upon what is taught. At the beginning of each six-week teaching period, faculty members at Sheridan complete a lesson plan template outlining what they will teach. The formatted lesson plan includes the following:

• Content and skills to be covered.
• State subject area and learning standards to be mastered.
• Assessment strategies.
• Essential questions, which serve as the scope and sequence of a unit.

Using the formatted lesson plan as an overview, the teachers then create their daily lesson plans. At the end of each month, teachers reflect upon what they outlined in the formatted lesson plan and then create a curriculum map of what they actually taught.

For example, a formatted lesson plan for teaching Hamlet might contain the following:

• Content—the play itself.
• Related skills and state standards—write a coherent, unified essay that focuses on one of the curriculum's essential questions, such as “How is the concept of existentialism expressed in Shakespeare's Hamlet?”
• Assessment—an open-response prompt with an excerpt from the play, which will also give students practice with similar questions in an 11th grade end-of-course literacy test.

Creating the Curriculum Map

The curriculum map has the same components as the formatted lesson plan. If a teacher has kept to the plan, creating the map becomes a matter of cutting and pasting from one computer file to another. More often than not, however, gaps in or additions to the actual instruction will appear on the map.

Just as formatted lesson plans represent an intention of what is to be taught, maps are the reality of what has been taught (Jacobs, 1997). Once the formatted lesson plans exist, the instruction has taken place, and each teacher has completed a map of what he actually taught, the faculty can then compare the curriculum in various ways: within a subject area or department, across all disciplines, or across grade levels. This process of comparing, referred to as articulation, usually reveals repetition or gaps in the curriculum. For example, if a 9th grade algebra teacher and a 10th grade geometry teacher are both teaching polynomials, articulation reveals the repetition and raises the question about why the topic is being taught twice. Articulation also helps to determine whether what a teacher says she's teaching is what her students are actually learning by revealing topics or skills, across grade levels, where remediation most often occurs.

It is essential that all teachers be involved in this formal process of curriculum realignment and articulation. Teachers' collaboration with their peers promotes a commitment to adhering to specific state and organizational curriculum frameworks and to a team approach to teaching all students in all disciplines.

Beginning the curriculum mapping process can be difficult across a school district. In Sheridan, for example, schools are grouped into four levels—elementary, intermediate, junior high, and high school—and each is working at mapping at a different rate. There is also the issue of sharing maps unless they are accessible in a central database. Adopting a systematic yet flexible process is vital to counteract nonprogressive sentiments and the false sense of autonomy of many teachers, particularly those in the secondary school settings (Jacobs, 2001). Curricular isolation does not fit with a 21st century school model; subjects are much too interrelated for teachers to be entrenched in autonomous and unilateral curriculum decisions.

Therefore, planning the stages of the mapping project before teachers actually map is crucial. Whether the mapping is to take place on a district or school level, its organizers will need to establish structures for collecting, reviewing, reflecting on, and collaboratively using the curriculum information that will be forthcoming.

To bring about real and sustained improvement in student learning and achievement, educators must primarily rely on cold, hard data that can be seen side by side with curriculum maps. Instructional leaders may claim that a particular program is successful, but they should also ask, Successful to what end? If the goal is to improve student achievement on state benchmarks, do educators make sure that subtest scores are analyzed? Does the school know how to interpret the results and share them with parents and other stakeholders? For these and other questions, instructional leaders must continually assess how professional development can integrate data collection with the mapping process.

Refining the Process

Instructional leaders should also evaluate and note the efficiency and relative success of each professional development session during the mapping process and make improvements from those observations. At one all-day cross-curricular mapping session, leaders hosted a working lunch to help teachers stay on task, ease personal tensions, and avoid extending the working day.

Data-driven analysis is the main benefit of mapping. Ideally, a computer database would help teachers and administrators establish and assess meaningful activities and programs in a timely and efficient way. A central database, which Sheridan High School does not yet have, would also permit easy collaboration with other schools in the district.

Mapping also gives credence to what teachers do and validates the curriculum. Inherent in the success of the mapping process is knowing where students are supposed to be going in coverage of content and to what extent they have reached their objectives. Curriculum maps can help guide students and show teachers that what they are teaching is actually being learned and used. Collaboration through critical feedback based on data is vital to the success of the student as learner and the teacher as teacher (Costa & Kallick, 1993).

Making Mapping Part of the School Culture

A long-term commitment to mapping can come only by infusing the process into the culture of the school. Commitment is developed when teachers understand the workings and the value of the process. At Sheridan, we insisted that the mapping process could not be rushed. This idea of acclimating everybody to the idea is vital; after all, it can be jarring for a veteran teacher to do something different after two decades of established routines. In our first year, teachers just drew up individual maps, which eased them into the process. Encouragement also came in the form of professional leave time, inservice training, and guided departmental meetings. Teachers thus had the opportunity to view mapping not as a passing educational fad but as a working model of curriculum alignment and articulation that ultimately makes better use of teacher time and school resources.

References

Costa, A., & Kallick, B. (1993, October). Through the lens of a critical friend. Educational Leadership, 51(2), 49–51.

English, F. (1983). Fundamental curriculum decisions. ASCD 1983 Yearbook. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Jacobs, H. (1997). Mapping the big picture: Integrating curriculum & assessment K–12. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Jacobs, H. (2001). Curriculum mapping: Aligning curriculum and assessment to the Arkansas standards. Presentation by Curriculum Designers, Inc., Little Rock, AR.