Curriculum Mapping is all the rage these days.
We've always had "long range plans" to guide our day-to-day planning in the classroom, but curriculum mapping can be a powerful tool for connecting curriculum themes in rich and meaningful ways, and planning out one's year as a teaching team within a school or district.
It can also be a total nightmare!
That's kind of what happened to us at my school... drawn into pretty templates and big buzzwords, we tried to pack it all in at once with little time for reflection on how practical (or not!) a document we were creating. The result was a busy, too-long, overcrowded document that many teachers rarely (if ever) referred to throughout the year.
As any classroom teacher knows, even the most well-intentioned philosophical approach has to be translated into practical terms if it is truly going to be of value, i.e. if it is going to find its way to kids in classrooms in any meaningful way.
In our quest to create a document that was both practical and visionary, we offer the following (and yes, you have to read the explanatory notes before you get the goods, lol!)
We invite your feedback; comments and questions are welcome.
We've always had "long range plans" to guide our day-to-day planning in the classroom, but curriculum mapping can be a powerful tool for connecting curriculum themes in rich and meaningful ways, and planning out one's year as a teaching team within a school or district.
It can also be a total nightmare!
That's kind of what happened to us at my school... drawn into pretty templates and big buzzwords, we tried to pack it all in at once with little time for reflection on how practical (or not!) a document we were creating. The result was a busy, too-long, overcrowded document that many teachers rarely (if ever) referred to throughout the year.
As any classroom teacher knows, even the most well-intentioned philosophical approach has to be translated into practical terms if it is truly going to be of value, i.e. if it is going to find its way to kids in classrooms in any meaningful way.
In our quest to create a document that was both practical and visionary, we offer the following (and yes, you have to read the explanatory notes before you get the goods, lol!)
We invite your feedback; comments and questions are welcome.
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