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Are you one of those people who like to lesson plan over the summer and ALL the other teachers are literally jealous of you because your lessons are all ready to go? You have your nights and weekends throughout the year. Well mostly -- those tests, papers, parent emails, student emails, and every other "job description" that they don't tell you about when you go into teaching but that suck the time away from you no matter what! So more accurately, you have more of your nights and weekends than you otherwise would, had you not pre-planned over the summer!
Well, this summer must be pretty overwhelming for you (especially). I know it is for a friend of mine, who is just like you. You see, me, I'm a little different. I'm the one who is jealous of you guys. Every summer I sit down to lesson plan and it just doesn't happen! I can't! So I have come to accept that and I do something a little different over the summers, I curriculum map.
I think this "mapping" technique can benefit many of you who don't know how else to plan during COVID.
Truth -- it can benefit any teacher, any time.
Here is how curriculum mapping works:
You start with the large picture. Start by identifying the skills and content knowledge you want your students to walk away with. Start by listing the standards and goals you want your students to hit. Identify, "What's the most important?!"
Your job is to identify the GOALS before the year starts, not the lessons necessarily. This creates the structure so your lesson planning becomes much more focused and intentional (READ HERE: EASIER). If we do have to switch back to distance learning, you won't need to fit that awesome lesson that took you 3 days to prep into a distance learning but rather you can identify the goal, and plan a lesson to hit that goal. Your lesson may look different than how it as looked in years passed, but if you are hitting the learning goal, then its OKAY that it looks different. And let's face it, nothing looks the same over distance learning. Your goal is not to recreate the same lessons you used in the physical classroom, but rather it is to achieve the same learning goals VIA distance learning.
What you want your students to learn should influence your ENTIRE year. This has always been the case, but is much more pronounced via distance learning.
So here comes the value of the map, if you haven't guessed it already! The map clearly identifies the goals, standards, and learning outcomes. If our year is disrupted again, at any point, all you need to do is consult the map. [I hope you find this discussion valuable even if you're not planning for any further COVID disruptions; and I sincerely hope you are right. This concept of understanding What and Why you are teaching is the best teaching practice for every teacher!]
This may be flipping the way some of you have lesson planned for years, on its head. Stick with me. Many of us are used to focusing on HOW are we going to teach the lesson? HOW are we going to engage the students? HOW are we going to... and when we find a cool lesson, we go with it.
I encourage you, especially for this year, to start with the WHY am I teaching this and WHAT am I teaching.
So there you have it. That's the value of a curriculum map.
Here is a sample template that I created:
You can see there are six categories:
Standards
Essential questions
Vocabulary
Content knowledge
Skills
Assessments
1. Let's start with standards.
Now for some of us, we get handed a book of standards. For others, there are no clearly defined standards and it’s up to you to work them out, maybe on your own or maybe with some help from your department or another teacher.
Either way, both of you have some work to do.
If you were given the standards: start to internalize them, break them down and understand them. Why is this something that is important for a student to learn? (And if you don’t think it is, find a way to figure out how SOMEONE could have valued it enough to put it there.)
If you were tasked with making the standards up on your own, figure out what it is that you want your students to have learned by the completion of your course and ensure that you connect to the why it’s important for students to learn this.
2. Moving onto Essential Questions.
These are the questions you will start each lesson or group of lessons off with. Take all of your smaller questions, and clump them together into an essential question. As the book, “What is an Essential Question?” describes an essential question is a "deep, thought-provoking, stimulating question that students will work toward to answer."
Let’s further break this down -- an example of a non-essential question in a 3rd-grade English lesson is, "Who is Maggie's best friend in the story?" This question can be answered by an analysis of the text. While an important skill, this is not the guiding question that guides your lesson.
Now let's look at an example of an essential question for the same lesson. "Who is a true friend?" While the content knowledge and reading comprehension skills are required to answer this question, it moves the students beyond the skills and, more importantly, it moves you as a teacher to think more deeply about where you are leading the students to.
Tip: List 3-4 essential questions per unit.
3. The next category is perhaps the easiest: Vocabulary.
What do students need to know to access the information? To progress in their understanding? While this is primarily content-specific vocabulary, you can include the non-academic vocabulary that students may need help with.
4. Finally, we made it to the CONTENT!
This is what you want your students to know.
5. Next comes skills.
What is the difference between content and skills? Skills are what students are expected to DO after they complete your unit. Some examples of skills you may be working on with your class are: Can your student learn how to break apart a word? Can your student read a particular type of figure? Discover evidence in a text? The content is the specific word, figure, or evidence. The skill is the process they go about in doing this, and in learning how to apply this to the new material, a new word, a new figure, a new piece of evidence.
6. You have made it to the final section, that of Assessments.
Once you know what you want your students to learn, plan how you are going to assess for that learning. Your assessments are your way of knowing if your students learned what you wanted them to learn. Well executed assessments can be a way to test your teaching of the material, just as much as it is to test how well the students learned the information. You don’t need to make the actual assessment, nor decide if it is going to be multiple choice, free response, or project-based. This is the time to plan out what you are going to be assessing for, what skills, what knowledge, what student learning.
So there you have it. The curriculum map that will help you gain control over this very uncertain school year. Through mapping your curriculum, you bring the focus, the clarity, and the intentionality into your lesson planning. You understand exactly what you want the students to learn and you know in advance how you are going to assess for that learning.
No matter what happens, you have control.
That’s where you can start.
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What are you excited about working on this summer?
How do you think curriculum mapping will change the way you view distance learning?
I would love to hear your comments and feedback!
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