Collaboration+with+Mapping+(article)

Using Mapping to jump-start collaboration
Michael S. Mills describing experiences from Sheridan HS in Sheridan, Ark.

Curriculum mapping is one powerful way to sharpen teachers' curriculum-design and teaching skills while promoting collaboration across subjects and grade levels. 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.

Teachers from different disciplines can 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.

First create a formatted lesson plan which 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.

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.

Adopting a systematic yet flexible process is vital to counteract non-progressive 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.