Curriculum mapping seems to provide the tools necessary for building a learning community that unifies a district or its schools with respect to determining what students are expected to learn, know and be able to do in each content area. While it may help to rein in teachers who have become accustomed to providing instruction based on their sense of what is meaningful to know and may take the guesswork out of what should be done in class, its success likely depends on the extent to which educators are invested in exploring the concept and their willing to examine the quality of their instruction, identify the goals and objectives instruction is sought to achieve and relinquish their absolute and unfettered autonomy for the betterment of all students.
Although its purpose seems evident, it is hard to imagine how it would unfold in a district with many schools and multiple classes in each grade level. In my prek through 8 school district—a district that serves approximately 300 students—third grade teachers do not even teach multiplication the same way. When students move on, teachers do not necessarily use the same language to describe the same process students learned the year before. In fact, staff members—many of whom maintain long standing friendships spanning decades—have met on several occasions in small team meetings to come to some common understanding and nomenclature of the most basic of concepts and terms but emerged with little success. Little horizontal or vertical consistency across classes, subjects and grade levels is noted. Although team meetings are designed to define expectations, encourage the development of mutual goals and objectives and foster collaboration, little, if anything, is accomplished. Few seem interested or invested in approaching education from an altered or common perspective and most feel the meetings are nonproductive and have little value. Perhaps if teacher evaluations included references to curriculum mapping, as described in the Curriculum Mapping article, more would be accomplished.
Education evolves slowly and is often the product of reluctant change. While change takes time, it should not be forgotten that students get sacrificed in the process.
1 comment:
The greatest challenge of curriculum mapping seems to be in motivating the staff to endorse it. Although the author suggested a series of staff development workshops, the staff you described will required more than this. It is similar in my setting where I felt that at least 20% of the staff needed to be transferred in order to break the cliques and change the culture of the school.
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