Curriculum Map Examples: Aims, Benefits, And Challenges Involved In Curriculum Mapping
Curriculum mapping is a method of organizing and aligning instruction used to determine what is taught and when based upon national and state mandated standards. These content roadmaps vary based on how the administration or development team wants to introduce learning targets, practice exercises, assessments, and remediation, so no two are the same. In addition, this plan can reveal gaps in the curriculum to help refine a district’s scaffolding plan to ensure seamless transition with discipline content and throughout grade levels.
Here are some example curriculum maps:
Before the advent of computers and the internet, teachers would design curriculum maps on paper and poster board. Today, teachers use spreadsheets, software programs, templates, and online services specifically dedicated to curriculum mapping to simplify the process.
What Does a Curriculum Map Include?
Usually, a curriculum map includes a complete plan for converting the curriculum standards into individual lessons. A basic map includes materials, lessons, assessments, and a chronological sequence of instruction organized by learning segment (i.e. by semester and further divided into 9 or 6 week chunks).
A basic curriculum map consists of:
- Standards – State, governmental, or other mandated learning expectations for each discipline
- Sequences – The logical order in which a teacher presents the standards to provide seamless instruction
An advanced curriculum map will include the following fundamentals in addition to basic standards.
- Content – Subject matter, including the key concepts, facts, and events that facilitate instruction
There are three standard categories for content:
- Discipline-based: focuses on a specific subject
- Interdisciplinary: focuses on connections between two or more subjects
- Student-centered: focuses on student-specific interests
- Skills – Specific target abilities from curriculum standards that teachers observe, assess, and document, often expressed through verbs (i.e. write, calculate)
- Assessments – Any number of broad approaches designed to evaluate student learning
- Activities – Specific actions conducted within a classroom to drive student mastery in skills and standards
- Resources – Required materials that teachers can access to supplement the student’s understanding of content or improve classroom engagement
- Essential Questions – Core considerations that students should contemplate and engage in to indicate their understanding of presented content
- Pacing Guide – Helps teachers stay on track and ensure curricular continuity across schools in the district. This should include anticipated timelines for teaching each unit.
- Units – Concepts and learning goals that teachers teach over a set period of time
What is the Aim of Curriculum Mapping?
A curriculum map should be well-organized and purposefully designed to facilitate learning. It should avoid academic gaps and needless repetition while maintaining alignment across lessons, courses, subject areas, and grade levels. When teachers map a curriculum, they establish a solid plan so that students can meet academic expectations in a particular subject area or grade level.
A curriculum map aims to achieve a few common goals:
- Vertical Alignment
Curriculum mapping ensures that teaching is purposefully structured and logically sequenced across grades so that students build on previous knowledge. When a curriculum is vertically aligned or vertically coherent, student knowledge is designed to smoothly transition from one grade’s content to the next, with all prerequisite skills covered so that the student is fully prepared for the next level. This process prepares the knowledge and skills in a way that progressively guides them toward challenging, higher-level work.
- Horizontal Alignment
When a curriculum is horizontally aligned or horizontally coherent, what students learn in one ninth-grade biology course, for example, is similar to what other students are learning in the same class universally, regardless of the teacher or school. All assessments, tests, and other methods of evaluation are based on the course content and learning standards governing that particular course, subject area, or grade level.
- Subject Area Coherence
When a curriculum is coherent within a single subject area—such as mathematics, science, or history—it ensures teachers within the discipline are working toward the same learning goals and standards while presenting students with the same high quality instruction and content.
- Interdisciplinary Coherence
When a curriculum is coherent across multiple subject areas, it combines content from different disciplines to enhance learning and help students understand that each subject does not operate in an isolated vacuum. This aspect of curriculum mapping focuses on integrating skills and work habits that students need for succeeding across many academic courses. For example, improving interdisciplinary coherence across a curriculum includes teaching students reading and writing skills in all academic courses; not just English courses.
Benefits of Curriculum Mapping
Curriculum mapping helps teachers determine whether the content and learning targets are aligned and may reveal any content gaps that may require scaffolding.
A curriculum mapping benefits program design by:
- Engaging students in their learning and developing life-long, ethical learners
- Ensuring coherent and meaningful curriculum as the course series is designed to achieve learning targets
- Following steady, systematic, and incremental educational best practices
- Supporting student learning and development while adhering to coherence and integration
- Upholding staff professional responsibility (intentionally cultivating and assessing student learning)
- Facilitating teacher collaboration
- Addressing accountability issues, including mandated standards, program review, academic quality, program prioritization, and budgeting concerns
- Implementing assessment programs targeted toward student success and growth
- Encouraging curriculum enhancements and engagement
- Stimulating the immersion of curriculum, teaching, and learning
Potential Challenges of Curriculum Mapping
Here are some common challenges district staff and teachers face when curriculum mapping:
- Course Prioritization
Organizing so many courses effectively can be complicated. It is better to start simple and only include required courses or targeted subject areas for your academic program. With these established baselines, it is easier to branch into supporting courses, and then elective courses.
- Single Courses with Multiple Instructors
Sorting this dilemma requires coordination among course teachers as well as standardization of content and assessments. Collaborating with teachers to discuss which Standards and Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) the course will support and how best to assess student learning can help staff arrive at a consensus for common expectations.
- Curriculum-driven Assessment
Although the curriculum drives the assessment, the Standards and SLOs shape the curriculum. Consider the overriding objectives first. This concept may be foreign to some programs derived from short-lived trends and individual instructor interests, but an effective curriculum is planned and designed, not the result of random evolution. When analyzing your curriculum for mapping, keep the SLOs, not the courses, central to the conversation.
Final Thoughts
Curriculum mapping provides an analytic framework for better understanding of skills and subject matter associated with mandated standards. It is designed to provide a smooth transition from lower to higher level skills and ensure that each student receives the same content and quality of instruction to perform successfully. Students will be able to transfer these skills from grade to grade as well as discipline to discipline with the final goal of transferring learning outside of school containment to real life in the outside world.
