Definitions:
Curriculum mapping is a procedure for collecting and documenting the operational curriculum anchored in the actual school calendar. Each teacher in the building enters critical information about the basic elements of the operational curriculum—that is: what has actually been addressed via content, skills, and assessment.
These basic elements are akin to a blueprint of the critical features of the operational curriculum that need to be communicated to other teachers in order to help the learner over time. We recommend that essential questions be included to frame, focus, and provoke the inquiry of students."
(Jacobs, Heidi Hayes,2004)
To read more go to www.curriculumdesigners.com
Curriculum mapping is the creation and maintenance of a database that can be analyzed. The contents of that database are the elements of the operational curriculum. Elements at the most basic level are content, skills, and assessments. Advanced elements include: essential questions, lessons, materials, activities, units, modifications and adaptations, technology.
Curriculum Mapping is the curriculum anchored in a timeline.
There are essentially three kinds of maps:
Diary maps are maintained by a teacher throughout the year and they are records of the operational or real curriculum in their unique classroom.
Projection maps are created by a teacher and they are the expected curriculum for the year. They are predictions and are not prescriptive or "set in stone" and may be used as a skeleton for a diary map.
Consensus or Core maps are created to identify areas in a course of study that a school or district believe are critical for every student and are therefore dependent on consistency.
Note: When a school commits to a mapping initiative it is important to recognize that there are times for structure such ascore maps, and there is a time for flexibility and autonomy which is recorded in the diary maps.
History
Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs began exploring the idea of curriculum mapping in 1988. She was searching for a way to make connections to help a New Jersey school district integrate their curriculum. What she found was that one of the only things each department / teacher had in common was the months of the year. This led to creating a calendar based organizer to record REAL curriculum data. I stress real because it is important to distinguish between what a teacher is planning to do, wants to do, is told to do - from what they actually do in the classroom each month. A map is a diary of what is ACTUALLY done in the classroom anchored in a timeline to help everyone from teachers to administrators make responsible curriculum decisions based on real data.
There are many choices a school can make to tailor fit mapping to their needs. Different kinds of maps (projection or diary) to different items to put on a map (Essential Questions, Content, Skills, Assessments, Themes, etc.) Schools can use curriculum mapping to create a system that replaces the current model of curriculum committees and documents and take the next step forward toward a modern curriculum system.
For more information contact us or read Mapping the Big Picture by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (1997), or Dr. Jacobs' Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping, which has just been published by ASCD (Nov. 2004).
