Curriculum mapping: What is it?

Today's opening professional development with Louise on curriculum mapping was so rich, but I realize it will take a two separate posts to explain it all! So I'm starting with what I've learned - albeit, in a very quick inquiry - about the concept of curriculum mapping (CM).

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)

Open House

This week is Open House at the Charter School. This means that upwards of 100 teachers will be with us for part of the week, observing classes, learning about Reggio Emilia and inquiry-based learning, and exchanging their reflections on their own work with each other. While certainly stressful on the Charter teachers and students, it is sure to be an invaluable opportunity to come together in community with fellow colleagues who are chewing on the same questions I am, perhaps.

It also means Louise Cadwell is with us, leading workshops and lecturing on Reggio Emilia, curriculum mapping, and incorporating "21st century skills", as she calls them, into today's teaching and learning. She is the recent founder of Cadwell Collaborative, a consulting service for educators and schools interested in implementing curricula that support 21st century skills, including sustainability education. She’s also well-known within the Reggio community for two books based on her work in the original Reggio Emilia schools: Bringing Reggio Emilia Home and Bringing Learning to Life.

I'm looking forward to blogging about the week as it progresses. It will take a number of posts, I’m sure to sort out all of my experiences, reflections, and studies.

Music Explore

Most of my students know me as a storyteller, a passion I’ve made no secret of. But this passion came about partially because the children kept asking for them. Stories are so innate to human communication, I wonder how I could be a teacher without recognizing myself as a storyteller?! Another fundamental genre, you might call it, of human expression, culture, and creativity, is music.

My mother says I was singing before I learned to talk. Throughout my school years, I studied four instruments, and that doesn't include the instruments I played for fun and experimentation, or the creative endeavors I've taken on as an adult. An entire corner of my small studio apartment is devoted to displaying and storing a variety of instruments, and believe me, they do not get dusty.

So why have I not brought this passion into the classroom? When this question struck me, my gut reaction was: It never seemed to fit. Whether in a curriculum-based classroom or not, there was rarely an overt opportunity for it. When I thought about this question further, within the context of emergent curriculum, where I'm beginning to make my pedagogical home, I realized that I'm focused on the passions, interests, and curiosities children bring with them into the community. So focused, in fact, that I forget what passions I, as the teacher, bring to the community. Children bring so much joy and excitement about what they experience outside the classroom, and we wish to honor that experience as part of their learning - why not honor our experience outside the classroom as part of our teaching?

So, in came the instruments last week: guitar, banjo, tamborine, bodhran, and washboard.

At first, everyone was hands on. Ulee and Bilal couldn’t seem to keep their hands on an instrument for a few seconds before being taken with another instrument next to it. Ulee started by strumming the banjo, still in the case, Bilal played the bodhran (pronounced “BOH-run”, a kind of Irish drum), Kerrick and Tessa examined the guitar, and each instrument was passed around for everyone to explore.

There were also plenty of observations and wonderings to be made by the children. The banjo held the greatest intrigue. Charlie said, “It looks like they started out wanting to make a drum, but then they changed their minds and wanted to make a guitar instead.” Others wondered what the material was on the banjo that looked like the head of a drum.

Ulee: It looks like hard plastic.
Bilal: Or maybe really thick paper.
Manuel: I think it’s cow bones that were made hollow. Or just hollow-sounding plastic.
Kelsey: It looks like a drum I have at home. It’s made out of animal skin.

Eventually, I picked up my guitar and started playing and singing a song, inviting everyone to play with me on another instrument. Kelsey played her flute: “I was playing all sorts of notes on my flute, but then I stuck to two notes, because I knew they sounded good with what you were playing.” Manuel tried different strokes on the head and the rim of the bodhran. Charlie tried playing the bodhran and the tamborine at the same time.

Everyone got a chance to play all the instruments they wanted. The guitar and banjo were certainly the most popular, and elicited the most observations and reflections.

Kerrick: We don’t usually interact with instruments.
Isaac: Can I strum the guitar with a block? What does that sound like?
Charlie: Look, you can play a guitar and a drum on the banjo at the same time! (strum - hit - strum - hit)
Manuel: I love how you can change the song [chords], ‘cause I really love this one (strums). I’m so excited, because I love music. It feels like I’m in a real band, like The Beatles. I’m pretty much a Beatle, you know, because my mom says I look like them.
Tessa: I’ve never really played a guitar or a banjo. I wish I had one of my own.

Kerrick expressed curiosity about the pins at the end of the neck of the guitar. He turned them and found that it changed the notes of the strings, making them higher or lower.’’

And so has the curiosity, wonder, and experimentation continued several days now. Being so close to my last day at this school, a more in-depth investigation is - unfortunately - not possible. However, it was entirely worth it to me to begin thinking about how a teacher’s interest can be provocation enough to invite children’s curiosities and wonderings. It reminded me to consider my own everyday experiences outside the classroom as equally as valuable to the classroom environment as those of the children. Just as I am teacher everywhere - in and outside the classroom - so am I the entire individual I am, everywhere, in the world, and in the classroom

What is a story? Part 2

Remember the story about Anansi, and about Nyame, the Sky God who gave him all the stories of the world? I wrote last November about some students ideas of what, exactly, Nyame gave to Anansi when he passed on all those stories. There was talk of bubbles full of pictures, shelves of books, and white stuff like from the brain of Professor Slughorn (from Harry Potter), just to name a few.

Today I was at a local elementary school telling stories, and of course, couldn't resist asking the question again. What do you think Nyame actually gave Anansi? Here are a few ideas from today:

He told him all the stories, because he couldn't give them to him.

Books.

You can't do imagination - it's nothing, so I think he gave him books.

He told him t he stories and Anansi brought them down in his mind to his friends.

Nyame gave Anansi books from his house. I don't know what kind of house ... oh, I know! The library!

It's always fascinating to me, when I ask this question, to see who leans more toward the idea of books versus the idea of telling the stories or transferring knowledge of them from one mind to the next. It makes me wonder where these connections - this schema for stories - comes from. From print-centered literacy curriculum? From our print-based culture of communication? From different learning styles (aural, visual, etc)?

I think about what stories are all the time - I'm a storyteller, after all - but I'm still stuck with this challenge of offering such a concrete definition or picture of it. It's like asking me what air looks like. I breathe it everyday, it is so crucial to my very existence, and downright miraculous ... and yet, so elusive in the concreteness of our perception of the world.

Where do your ideas come from?

Avery: Manuel, where do your ideas come from?
Manuel: From my imagination. In my brain. Like pictures in my mind.
Avery: Where do the pictures come from?
Manuel: From the TVs in my brain.
Avery: Where did the TVs come from?
Manuel: From the mechanical people in my mind. They build the TVs in my mind. And the airplanes.
Avery: What are the airplanes for?
Manuel: They fly out of my brain to get more ideas.

What is a story?

There is a story of how Anansi (a well-known trickster figure in West African stories) brought all the stories of the world down to earth. There are several versions published, the most famous of which is probably "A Story, A Story" by Gail E. Haley. I tell a version based on how the story is recorded in a book called "Family of Earth and Sky", edited by John Elder and Hertha D. Wong.

I've always enjoyed telling this story, and have told it many times. However, I will never tell this story the same way again after one of my students, Isaac, asked a question at the end.

Briefly, in the story I tell, Anansi appeals to the Sky God, who originally had all the stories, who tells him he needs to bring him three animals. Anansi goes and manages to trick them all into being caught, takes them up to the Sky God ...

The Sky God was astounded to see that Anansi had, indeed, fulfilled all of the tasks he had assigned. With a heavy heart, the Sky God gave Anansi all the stories of the world. Anansi took them back down to earth to share with all the animals and people. And last I heard, he is still telling them today.
Isaac: So what did the Sky God give him anyway? Like, books or something?

I caught myself beginning to answer, though I didn't know what I thought at the time. Better to bite my lip and ask my favorite question: "What do you think?"

Ted: "If it were a story about a tiger it would be a tiger that goes in a book."
Tessa: "I think it's like little circles with whatever it's about inside. Like if it was a story about butterflies, it would be a bubble with butterflies inside."
Bobby: "It's like in Harry Potter. This guy, Professor Slughorn has a wand and he put it up to his head and pulls a memory out. It's white stuff. So I think it would be white like that. ... See, Dumbledore had a memory in a jar, but it was a fake memory. Well, not a fake memory, but there was something wrong with it, so Slughorn pulled out his memory - the right memory - and put it in a jar for Harry Potter."
Isaac: "But what would it look like if a GOD gave you a story? I think he just started throwing books at him his sack."
Manuel: "It's probably like this piece of paper with stories on them. You look at them for a long time until you can tell the story without looking at the pictures and worlds. Like, it's a piece of paper with words on it. And pictures from the story."
Kerrick: "Maybe they're ghost-like because they were given by a god. Like, invisible, or see-through. He could still see the words because they're darker, but the paper would be invisible."
Charlie: "I don't think they looked like anything. He just made it so that Anansi could tell the stories."

I was blown away by these responses, I felt the breath taken right out of me. Beneath all of these thoughts, there raged the deeper question of what a story really is.

I took advantage of other telling opportunities and gathered the following ideas from other children:
"I think the Sky God took all the stories from where he kept them, like on a bookshelf in his bedroom, and gave them to Anansi."
"I think he just told Anansi all the stories."
In one case, I mentioned: "One girl I know said she thought they were bubbles with pictures from the story inside."
Response: "Oh yeah! And then they pop and come out. When he wants to tell a story, he pulls out the bubble and pops it open and the story pops out!"

The same group of kids from above continued along these lines when I told another story, "The Uwabami", a trickster tale from Japan, when Manuel noted: "At the library, I found a story like that, but it was a little different.
Isaac: "How would you know what the real story is?"
Avery: "What do you think?"
Isaac: Well, just ask the person who wrote it.
Kerrick: But they're probably not alive.
Iver: There is no real story. There's more than one and they're all good.
Charlie: Yeah. Everyone tells it differently.
Bobby: Yeah, you can hear it, you can change it, then pass it on.
Manuel: When a person dies, the person finds it [the story] and changes, and it gets changed and changed and changed until it's so changed that no one can change it anymore.
Avery: Is there a "real" story that we can find somewhere?
Kelsey: Not exactly. There is an original story ... no, there really isn't, because even storytellers tell stories different every time.
Manuel: There was probably a real story far far away and people thought he was a great storyteller and put the story where he lived.
Avery: But let's say we want to find the real story of "The Uwabami". The original. What would we do to find that out?
Kerrick: Maybe the thinking of it was probably a snake. When the author thought of the Uwabami, he thought it should be a snake.
Isaac: We could go to Japan and ask the villagers who the author is.
Tessa: Who is the author?
Avery: Good question. Who wrote that story, or told it first?
Several: You?

I share all of these comments as the stuff I am chewing on as I consider the question of what a story really is. I recall a remarkable woman I met in Germany, a renowned choir leader who went to some high organization in the world of church music, held a hymnal in front of them and said, "There are no hymns in this hymnal." Very controversial, but she stood her ground, arguing that a hymn is not a hymn until it is song, given voice by humans, and heard by humans, in community with each other.

I wonder if the same could not be said for stories?

IS THIS A STORY?

Now, this is a particularly ironic question to ask considering the title. But consider any storybook. Is a book a story? When I recall the choir leader's notion of what constitutes a hymn, I feel I have no choice but to say, No. The book itself is not the story, but that which is read and heard by people.

And yet, the story communicated in this book is quite different than other versions of that same story. So, it seems the representation of the story does matter, as there are several possible ways to depict the same story.

And yet again, I recall an idea - a claim, really - that Kieran Egan shared this past summer (at a summer course in Imaginative Education). It is, at least, my memory that he warned against the belief in our current print-based, information-driven culture that knowledge exists on the paper, or worse, "in the file" or "on my phone." (I have had several friends refer to their iPhones as "my second brain"). The alphabet is merely a code, he said, but the knowledge it represents can only be grasped by the human brain who deconstructs an idea into code and the human brain(s) who reconstructs it from code. Of course, the original idea exists in the mind of one human, and none can tell what idea will exist in the minds of others when communicated to them. "You hear it, you can change it, and you pass it on..."

As might be obvious, I am leaning toward the position that a book is not a story. But I don't want to resolve myself to a definitive decision in either direction. I am excited to continue to share my favorite story listeners' ideas with others and to ask the questions that arise from recalling them (of which there are many I've not included!).

There are also, of course, other print media to consider besides books. But the question remains the same.

What is a story?

Not a Box

I am really cherishing the opportunity to continue building my relationship with the Raindrop community. After subbing for Emily for a week, and now for Brad for a week and two days, I feel a real connection with each of the children and continue to enjoy each and every one of them.

Yesterday, as some of us were looking for a book to read, I came upon this one, “Not a Box”, by Antoinette Portis. It is a gem of a book, about all the things that a box can become. The dedication says it all, really: “To children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes.”

When I finish reading or telling a story, I often like to ask the children an open question. I’m not looking for any particular answers, just getting a sense of the kids’ thoughts on what happened in the story or on how it relates to their own lives.

This book lends itself well to such open questions. The pages alternate between a picture of the bunny as an adult would see it - sitting in a box, standing on a box, wearing a box, etc. - and a corresponding picture of what the bunny understands the box to be - a race car, a mountain, a robot costume, etc. Accompanying each picture is text that refers to the voice of either the adult or the bunny.

Why are you sitting in a box? It’s not a box.

After reading the book through the first time, I decided to go back to the first set of pages to talk about them a little.

Avery: It sounds like someone is asking her, “Why are you sitting a box?” And she says “It’s not a box.” What is it to her?
Kevin: A race car.
Avery: On this first page, it really looks like it’s just a box, but on this next page, I can see how she sees in her mind that it’s a race car. I wonder why she thinks it looks like a race car? Let’s look at the first page again. Why does she think it’s a race car?
[Silence.]

We went through the rest of the book, noting how the bunny thinks of the box differently depending on how she is positioned in relation to it. Kevin and Jessie were especially eager to share how well they remembered what each box was going to become on the next page. I asked a few times, “What else to could the box be in this picture?”, focusing on the plain, black and white depictions of the bunny. No answers. Hmm.

After reading the book a second time, we were sitting near the fabric basket. I said, “It’s fun to pretend that the materials we play with can be something else. Like the fabric. Just like the box, it’s not fabric, it’s … what else could it be?”

No answer. Kevin and Eden picked up the fabric to consider it.

Perhaps too soon, I said, “I wonder what this fabric could be. I know! It’s not fabric, it’s a snake!” With that, I shaped a piece of fabric into a long snake-like figure. I had hoped this would get their imaginations going, so I asked, “What else could it be?”

Kevin: “It’s a snake!” [started to play with it, holding it at one end]
Avery: What do you think, Isla? What else could the fabric be?
Jasmine: Snake!
Avery: Duzan, what are you going to make the fabric be?
Eden: A snake!

Hmm. Not exactly the kind of game I had thought this would be. Until I remembered that children this age are still very much learners through mimicry, not fully understanding something someone has said until they say it themselves. We see this every day as one child says something, and all the others say it back, as if echoing to show the first child that s/he’s been heard.

I realized at this point that I was far too invested in what I was looking for, and not open enough to what the children were telling me. I was looking, of course, for their sense of the abstract, their understanding of how a box can be imagined to be so very many things - indeed, how anything can be anything else, if we put our minds and imaginations to it.

But, why was I looking for them to tell me about it? I saw them thinking abstractly every day!

At the playdough table, Eden comments to Theo, “I’m making a pancake.” Theo replies: “I’m making a pancake, too. No, I’m making a pizza.” Together, on the big chair, several children fly together on an airplane to Alaska.
Jasmine shows Adam a “bee” on the lamp stand. And blocks! How many times have I watched blocks become castles, cars, storefronts, houses?! And yes ... (as pictured here) even as potties.

The point is, contrary to what a lot of courses and texts on child development like to say, children ARE abstract thinkers, from the very beginning. They use everyday objects to represent other objects and ideas all the time - it is the very basis of their play. What I have marveled at these past few weeks is that, while the children seamlessly play with abstract notions all day, the moment I try to probe their thinking about their play, it’s as if they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s as if Jean Piaget - who introduced the whole notion that children think concretely before they think abstractly - swoops down at precisely that moment to magically prevent me from unlocking the secret.

What is that secret? The only sense I can make from these observations is that, while children are, as I said, already abstract thinkers at a young age (in this case, 2-3 years old), what fails them is consciousness about their thinking: they lack metacognition. They can understand that a black piece of fabric with sparkles put over their head turns them into a spider web, but they don’t understand how they can understand that. Metacognition - thinking about our thinking - is what enables us to separate concrete from abstract thinking in the first place. It also helps us make sense of both concrete and abstract meanings in the world around us - in literature and film, in advertisements, in the behaviors of those around us, and of complete strangers, and so on.

When does this consciousness arise? I’m not sure, to tell the truth. But I do know that children are not only abstract thinkers, but keen observers, as well. The more we, as adults and teachers, can model our thinking out loud, the more they will pick up on this marvelous, dynamic, and outright fascinating process we call human thinking.

I know it’s not a box. But what is it to you?