Response to "Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment k-12"
According to Heidi Hayes Jacob, curriculum mapping involves much more than a day to day plan instructional and standards based plan for a subject-it is much more the interdependence between long range planning, short-term preparation, and clear communication that is prefaced in a cumulative and interdisciplinary background knowledge of the students’ education. Curriculum mapping must necessarily be contextualized within the micro(classroom) and macro (district) levels of horizontal planning through the course of one academic year and vertical planning that extends throughout the k-12 experience respectively.
Although my alternative middle school’s small size theoretically lends itself to team and interdisciplinary planning-vertical curriculum mapping or for that matter, any type of long –range planning that takes into account academically where the students have been and where they need to arrive has not yet been attempted, (if not avoided.) Quite honestly, given the demographics of our student population, each child being 2-3 years behind grade level-such long-term planning and consideration that vertical curriculum planning requires is often overwhelming at times irrelevant. All too often, we rather employ the type of planning that Jacobs describes as “coming together to formulate lists of objectives, skills, and concepts that are optimum goals for teachers to implement” and “occasionally inspire and focus teachers’ actions” but remain nothing more than “lifeless inventories of isolated skills.” At this point, at best our interdisciplinary team structured planning has adequately accomplished the horizontal method of curriculum mapping.
In order to successfully curriculum plan this summer, it will be imperative for us to be focused on not only what is being taught, but of the skills we are addressing along with the assessment of these skills. By focusing on what we need to teach instead of what we teach and deciding what form, how, and over how much time it should be done- we may accomplish the kind of comprehensive curriculum mapping that Susan M. Duke[1] defines in as an “integrated curriculum” that is “multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary,” and truly accomplish the task of ‘mapping.’
