I've been doing some research the past few days on curriculum mapping software. I've been looking at the ins, outs, upside-downs, and sideways of 4 different programs, analyzing their features and setting up webinars and phone meetings with sales reps.
As a teacher, I did my fair share of curriculum mapping. First we diary-mapped individually, then we did a gap analysis, then we revised our maps based on that data, and then we put it in our mapping software. The process took a few years, and included training staff how to write and organize their curriculum around such concepts as essential questions, unwrapped standards in the form of I can statements that were aligned to essential questions, identifying essential academic vocabulary, and integrating a host of learning strategies into instruction. Oh, and not to mention a lot of training on how to use the mapping program itself.
But the most valuable habit to emerge from all that training and mapping was that we began to have conversations about and around our curriculum. We began to talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other, and plan together. We collaborated, discussed, argued, and finally agreed. But our collaboration did not equal standardization. We all realized that the 30 or so students in each of our classes were different, and each group of students often needed a slightly different approach to the learning outcomes we had all agreed upon in our maps. The end result of learning was the same, but the approach to it often was not. It had to be different, or we weren't going to do right by our students.
And every year after we started this process, we sat down with our curriculum and revised it every year, unit by unit. We tweaked the learning itself, or we changed the many different ways to get students to do the learning and show evidence of their understanding. We finally truly collaborated. How different from when I first started teaching at that same school 12 years earlier, when I was handed a box of textbook materials and told "this is what the teacher before you did." And when I asked what the other biology teacher did in his classroom, I was told to go and ask him-they didn't really know.
After going through the mapping process, we all knew what the curriculum was. We had the same baseline of understanding about our curriculum, so we could then all jump into fruitful discussions and planning sessions and crazy collaboration meetings where we all left happier after 90 minutes of working together instead of grumpy after 90 minutes of protecting our curricular turf.
But what about the curriculum maps?
I have to say that the maps were not what we had discussions around. The mapping process itself got the ball rolling and spawned some much needed professional practices (along with a common vocabulary to use in our curriculum discussions), but the maps were not our focus. As a matter of fact, the actual entry of the data into the maps became a tedious thing that prompted much not-so-inconspicuous eye-rolling when "Time for curriculum mapping" was on an institute day schedule. The more we took the time to sit down and discuss what students should be learning and what ways there were to learn it and how students should show us their learning, the less we needed to open up a map. I think an important question to ask about curriculum mapping is this one that I found on this site during my research:
"Curriculum mapping is a labor-intensive data-entry exercise, widely regarded as costly to many and valuable to few. So ask
yourself: what are you going to do with the data to provide real value to both the institution and to everyone who put so much into it?"
The real value to us was providing an entry point into collaborative and fruitful discussions around the curriculum, helping us move away from the independent classroom contractors that we were and towards working together as a team with student learning as our common focus. In retrospect, if the mapping software had features that allowed for reflection and discussion with the program (perhaps asynchronously?), or even a lesson planner where we could record lessons based on our curriculum discussions, then we would have opened up the program much more often than we did.
The focus of curriculum mapping shouldn't be on the program, or even the map itself. Yes, the program and the map produced within the program can be useful, but that's not where the value of mapping lies. We can't forget that the process of mapping is just as important, a process through which teachers can collaborate and grow as teachers themselves.