Curriculum Mapping ADL – Aug 2011

1. Curriculum MappingADL – Aug 2011 Amy Cole CCSU acole@ccsuvt.org

2. What is Curriculum Mapping? • Based on the work of Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs. • Curriculum mapping is simply writing down your plan for the year. • It is fluid (not static) document, changing throughout the year to represent what really happens in relationship to what you plan to happen. • It recognizes that you don’t teach in a vacuum, that you have a limited number of days, a set number of students, field trips, assemblies. • It can have many layers, dependent on what your goals are.

3. The primary audience for maps is internal (teachers, colleagues)…BUT it can be provided to parents and students by the teacher annually but it is NOT the published school curriculum. • Mapping can further the teacher and team’s use of backwards design. • It can further your work on individual and common assessments. • It can increase communication between teachers, teams, grade levels, content areas, schools re: curriculum. • Specialists, librarians and special educators will love you!

4. What Curriculum Mapping is NOT… • Curriculum • A set of standards (no NCLB police here!) • Your textbook or instructional materials

5. Three types of curriculum • Intended curriculum (your ideal year) • Implemented curriculum (when reality hits) • Acquired curriculum (what each student learned) • (TIMMS Study) • Mapping represented first, the Intended and then the Implemented curriculum.

6. Which instrument, for what purpose?

7. Types of maps (depends on your goals) • Team/Overview Maps (big picture, all subject areas). • Individual Classroom Map (dig in deeper, more detail on each subject area.) • Consensus maps – An agreement among a teaching team and/or school district • Vertical maps – Examining the child’s experience or multiple pathways vertically through the system. • Diary map – Individual teachers just writes down what they do and at the end of the year has a record of what really happened.

8. Team map or Overview Map

9. Team/overview map Why use this type of map? • Gets your year down at a quick glance • Easy for others to read (team mates, other grade level teachers, spec educators, library/media specialist, related arts, etc.) • Helps in conversations about sharing common resources (magnets, books microscopes) • Helps provide a quick glance for teachers of lower grade and upper grades to see what the child experienced • Easy to share with parents • Helpful in having school-wide curriculum discussions (revising or creating new curriculum) • A great opportunities to look for interdisciplinary connections or team teaching.

10. Degrees of Integration Degrees of curriculum integration one discipline 2 subjects > 2 run common problem, student- run concurrently concurrently theme, essential centered, questions problem-based      (single teacher) (timing) (timing) (teachers co-planning) (student co-plans)

11. Team/Overview Map

12. Team/Overview Map

13. Team/Overview Map

14. Individual teacher (deeper) map… Why use this type of map? • This really causes you to think about your plans, really challenges you to be intentional about your classroom time. • Helps to articulate further what your implemented curriculum looks like. • Allows for some rich discussion among teachers about their thinking. • Reveals gaps and overlaps in areas that could otherwise not be found in the ‘big picture’ type of maps. • Great for looking for discrepancies between what we think our kids are learning and how they are performing on assessments. • Really drives your assessment planning

15. The individual teacher/class map

16. The individual teacher/class map Concepts, big ideas, essential questions What is keeping this unit or topic focused? What are the overarching themes? Assessed using more complex assessments (essays, performance assessment.) Sometimes it is not measurable at all but important nonetheless. Don’t create essential questions just for the sake of it. If you can’t come up with one, move to a big idea or concept.

17. The individual teacher/class map Content Smaller bits of knowledge. Non-negotiable, they just have to know it. Easily assessed.

18. The individual teacher/class map Skills Observable actions. Use action verbs (“…ing”) Ex: editing, writing a persuasive essay, comparing/contrasting, hypothesizing, analyzing, predicting. Try to avoid following it with a noun (content) if you can. Keeps you focused on the skill over the content.

19. The individual teacher/class map Assessments Now that you’ve listed what you are INTENTIONALLY teaching, what tools will you use to measure it? Tests, quizzes Performance assessments, projects Anchor tasks Essays Teacher observation Formative? Summative? Common, individual?

20. The individual teacher/class map You can add anything else to your map that makes sense for you. Field trips, testing windows, technology skills, activities, book lists, materials…you name it. Just add rows as needed.

21. Concept, content, skills….so what? Why do we care? • Because it results in different student outcomes in different classrooms (Your content might be my concept might be someone else’s skill) • A tale of two units…. • Teaching weather through poetry vs. Teaching poetry using weather • “touching on” the US regions vs. memorizing the states in the regions vs. mapping the regions (physical & political)

22. Concept, content, skills….so what? Why do we care? • Because it drives the assessment tools we choose to use. • Content (small bits of knowledge)  quickly measurable with selected response assessment tools (multiple choice, short answer, matching, etc.) • Concepts (big ideas)  more challenging to measure (essays, performance assessments, personal communication) • Skills (a measurable ACTION…”ing”)  observable

23. Stiggins

24. Essential questions • Intended to be unanswerable, provocative, drive the unit…but allow student to access it in their own way. • Really narrows down those large units for kids. • Really motivating for some content areas, less so for others. • Can further involve interdisciplinary connections and convey relevance. • Students can be involved in drafting essential questions (because good questioners make good thinkers). • Don’t force it. You don’t need an essential question for everything!

25. Examples • Was the Civil War “civil”? • Is the Civil War over? • Are animals necessary for man’s survival? • How does our architecture reflect our society? • Are there some human values that transcend time and place? • What is my role in the biosphere? • What does it mean to be “healthy”?

26. Vertical Map Why use this type of map? • Once the classroom maps are constructed, this is an easy tool to use to look at school-wide approaches to something • Ex: where writing genres are taught, practices and assessed • Ex: looking for math strands which are undervalued or overvalued • Thinking about how related arts topics can be reinforced in the classroom and vice versa.

27. Vertical Map….EX: Math

28. Vertical Map…EX: Science

29. Other types of maps • Consensus map: any individual or team map that represents an agreement across teachers, teams schools. • The 9th grade map for the year (all content areas, might go to kids and parents) • The Algebra I map (for 9th grade and 8th grade teachers) • The Biology I map • The map used to divy up science materials when you don’t have enough to go around! • The diary map: the map that gets created along the way. • Some teachers like to make a map for the year, to sketch it out ahead of time but then keep a separate “diary” map to record what actually happens. • Interesting to compare at the end of the year.

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