Curriculum Mapping 101

Last week the social studies crew came up with a curriculum map for MTC Summer School 2008. With so much material to cover sometimes it's hard to determine what to teach. We're trying to put a year's worth of material in a summer and some things will inevitably get left out but our task was set before us and our task we attacked. This was perhaps the biggest challenge faced when developing the curriculum map, however. A second challenge that we encountered while developing the curriculum map was what order to put different lesson or objectives in. This past year I used a chronological curriculum map for my U.S. History I course (i.e. Native American groups, arrival of European explorers, "settling" of the U.S., etc.), a regional curriculum map for my world history course (i.e. unit on North America, unit on South America, unit on the Caribbean and Canada, etc.), and a straight-up objective-by-objective curriculum map for my Mississippi Studies course (i.e. objective 1a for a few days, then 1b, then 1c, etc.). Each had their benefits and drawbacks though so determining which is best is not a very easy task.

These curriculum maps that I developed this past year were not very beneficial. Firstly, I was all-but derailed from all of my curriculum maps by February and thus came to the understanding that like my fellow Igbo man Chinua Achebe once famously wrote, "things fall apart." Secondly, the course that we are teaching this summer is the U.S. History II course that Mississippi juniors take and only Rob has ever actually taught the course during the regular school year. Thus only one of the three second-years know what the course outline actually looks like over a year's time. A third reason why my curriculum maps were not beneficial is because I wanted the curriculum maps that we used during summer school to be the result of group effort and consensus--not just the transplanting of my vision for what I did with my students in Humphreys County onto our summer school students and my fellow MTC teachers. For these reasons, I did not find my curriculum maps made during this past school very beneficial or applicable to what we're doing in Holly Springs this summer.

Hopefully from the curriculum map that we developed our first years can see what one looks like and get solid inspiration on how to model their own based on ours. That's the goal.