After our conversation today, I noticed a book on the library shelf on CM: Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping (2004), edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Jacobs, I believe, wrote the first definitive work on CM, called Mapping the Big Picture (1997), and is now the Director of Curriculum 21, a company that teaches, coaches, and supports schools and districts in implementing curriculum mapping.
After a brief read of the book, and some Internet research, the impression I get is that CM is a re-imagining of the purpose of state standards and benchmarks for learning. Currently, teachers look at what students are expected to know of their specialty, and derive their curriculum accordingly - either in grade-level teams, department-based teams, or as individuals. CM seems to prod teachers to think more collaboratively about the standards as a trajectory of learning rather than a fragmented series of topics to learn. As a result, they can better understand how their specialty (grade level and/or subject) fits into the larger arc of a student's journey acquiring necessary skills and knowledge.
The “work” of CM is layered. Teachers must first identify as a collective learning community, across grade levels and subject departments. They must come to consensus within their specialties as to what requires consistency and what requires flexibility in each subject area. As a result of this deliberation, schools and districts achieve an “essential” map, a skeleton, perhaps, for the curriculum of each grade level and subject area to be built upon.
CM yields no finished product, but rather, an established culture of communication among teachers. With the help of technology, teachers enter their broad plans for a year’s worth of curriculum into a database, which can be accessed by all other teachers involved. Categories of information on each unit include:
Essential Questions: overarching questions that guide instruction and provide connections to big ideas beyond the classroom
Content: broad topic of study, including major subcategories and underlying concepts
Skills: required for mastery of big ideas, including demonstration of knowledge and generally critical skills
Assessments: evidence of understanding of big ideas, usually based in product or performance, with flexibility for varying expressions of understanding
Activities: support the learning of skills
Resources: print materials, field trips, audio/visual media, and teacher resources
Once units are entered into the database, the information they provide becomes fluid, accessible to everyone. At this point, rather than continuing making curriculum decisions by grade level or department team, teachers can meet in “vertical” (in groups of K-2 teachers, for example) and “cross-disciplinary” teams to look at student performance data and determine how the curriculum can be adjusted to better meet their needs. And that is the real crux of CM: the point of curriculum is to ensure that the needs of students are met in the trajectory of their K-12 education. When Jacobs writes about the imaginary student present at each teacher meeting, meant to keep conversation focused on the students, I remember a colleague of mine who continually reminded me, “We don’t teach curriculum, we teach students.” Though it takes an immense amount of work to implement CM, Jacobs considers it a necessary adjustment to the current paradigm of curriculum planning and decision-making.
Getting Results consists of several chapters by varying educators and administrators who report on how CM has been implemented in their schools, and what they have found in the process. Each examines CM from a different perspective: a whole school district, an independent school, the principal's role, necessary technology, etc. Jacobs writes a few chapters, herself, providing some synthesis and overarching ideas and questions involved in the process of institutionalizing CM.
Two interesting analogies caught my eye in this book. The first compared CM to a tool belt, complete with the following one-to-one comparison (p.11):
... [C]urriculum mapping is like a tool belt because it contains or holds information about what a teacher really teaches:
The belt is the calendar that organizes the tools
The belt buckle allows for adjustable pacing through the school year
The content hammers in the standards - the nails
The mapping tool drills in essential questions for authentic probing and learning
The pliers (skills) hold the content, standards, and assessments together
The screwdriver turns content into knowledge
The measuring tape can be used to assess student buildings (products)
The other analogy is offered by Jacobs in the last chapter of the book (p.131):
If a patient is admitted to the hospital for surgery, who among the professionals should meet to give the best possible care? Who should meet to work toward ultimate recovery and health? The best interest of the patient is served when the surgeon works with the chain of care - from the internal medicine physician, to the receiving nurse, to the anesthesiologist... In short, decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient’s needs.
So must teachers organize themselves when making curriculum decisions: not around subject area or grade level, but around the students they teach. This suggestion reminds me of my work in schools in Germany, where students are organized into classes, based in one classroom, while teachers roam from one classroom to another to do their teaching. Each teacher still has his/her specialty, but is responsible, for example, for teaching that subject in classes 10a, 7b, and 5c. (Numbers correspond to grade level, the letters to sections) I’m not entirely aware if German teachers meet together to make curriculum decisions, but I can imagine that such a school set-up would make such decision-making, as Jacobs is suggesting, possible.
She continues her analogy: One place where there is no opportunity to for thoughtful planning and preparation is the emergency room, where medical personnel know almost nothing about the prior record or experience of each arriving patient. There is an urgent, anxious tone to the set of decisions that must be made quickly without benefit of a strong understanding of the patient’s experience. Sometimes it seems as if we give an emergency room education, because we have so little good information about our learners.
What I hear Jacobs saying is that we are currently so focused on the crisis of education, we’ve become too focused on the content we are teaching, and lost sight of the students. I might argue that this has long been the case, how public education was designed from the beginning. But more of my response in later posts. I found a very helpful video on YouTube of an interview with Jacobs that continues with this analogy further: click here to view. She presents a hypothetical situation, in which she imagines a student’s history of learning traveling with her the way a patient’s medical history travels. No matter where that patient is being cared for, his caregivers can access the most important information about his allergies, past surgeries, medications, etc. Likewise, teachers could also have access to the curriculum each of their students has already experienced, including big ideas and critical skills, so that they can properly build on prior learning.
Finally, I’ll briefly summarize with a third analogy, taken from the name of curriculum mapping, itself. Curriculum comes from the Latin for “course”, as in a path to walk. In this way, curriculum mapping intends for teachers to create a map to help them guide students across the terrain of their learning. Because students are being held accountable to the same standards of learning, it is important that teachers come to a consensus about important benchmarks along the way (benchmarks also being a term commonly used in the language of educational standards). Each student may walk their own path and build their own collection of experiences in their education, but teachers must work together to assure that each path hits the necessary benchmarks, so that all students end their K-12 journey with an equitable collection of valuable learning experiences.
Other useful links:
Heidi Hayes Jacobs on Critical Transformations
Curriculum mapping overview (Powerpoint)
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