Apply: Deep Dive

Use Your Curriculum Map as a Planning Tool and a Record

While curriculum mapping at the beginning of a school year is a powerful process that helps you analyze your standards and plan your instruction, you can also use curriculum maps throughout the school year to track what actually happens in your classroom. Make time after each project to reflect on questions like "Where did I deviate from my original plan, and why?" "Were there skills that were easier or more difficult for students to master than I originally anticipated?" "Might this project have worked better if students had already learned ____?" Document your reflections and use them to inform your curriculum mapping for next year.

Use Data from Incoming Students to Inform Mapping

Gathering information about student readiness can help you anticipate how much time you'll need to spend on each concept, which skills and concepts you'll need to review or reteach, and where you might be able to accelerate your instruction. In addition to student grades and standardized test data, gather information from their former teachers to find out what concepts were emphasized in the prior year, how those concepts were introduced, and in what areas students might need review or remediation. If it's possible to access curriculum maps from the students' previous year of learning, use those documents to guide your conversation with students' former teachers.

Generate a Schoolwide Map for Common Skills

There are certain skills-- from editing a video to facilitating a discussion to writing a persuasive letter-- that cross curricular boundaries. As a school, take the time to generate a list of these skills. Then develop a coordinated plan to identify when and how each skill will be introduced, revisited, and reinforced across the courses students experience in each grade level. These conversations help to address gaps and redundancies in students' skill development, and ease the burden on individual teachers to introduce and reinforce every key skill.