“The textbook is not the curriculum; what a teacher does with the textbook is the curriculum,” according to Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Dr. Hayes Jacobs was a keynote speaker at Measured Progress’s third annual Education Leadership Conference, held last month in Danvers, Massachusetts. 

Hayes Jacobs began her keynote address with a definition of “curriculum mapping.” Curriculum mapping, she explained, is a process for gathering data about the operational curriculum in a school—what teachers are actually working on with their students. “By mapping what’s being taught and when it’s taught, teachers produce data they can use in conjunction with assessment data to make curriculum revisions in instruction,” Hayes Jacobs said. 

“Unlike curriculum guidelines, which target goals to inform practice, curriculum mapping displays the actual time it takes to implement curriculum depending on the pacing needs of students. As one principal put it, ‘Our guidelines are our intention. Our maps are our reality,’” she added. 

To develop curriculum maps, teachers enter three types of information for the major areas they’ll cover through the course of the school year: content, or the subject matter itself; assessment, or a demonstration of student learning such as tests or performances; and skills, or specific, observable actions. “The database reflects precisely when teachers address certain content and skills and assign certain assessments,” Hayes Jacobs explained. 

Since each teacher enters data about their classroom curricula electronically into a database geared to the school calendar, all teachers have immediate access to a wealth of information—what is being taught currently, what was taught in previous years, and even what might be taught in subsequent years. For example, a middle school biology teacher can examine what students studied last year in elementary school, as well as what’s going on down the hall in English. “This means that he can adjust his presentation to reflect previously taught science concepts and to accommodate the teaching of parallel writing strategies for lab reports based on actual online data from other teachers,” Hayes Jacobs said. “Without this type of data, educators are second-guessing their instructional choices or perhaps basing them on erroneous perceptions or old guidelines. By using curriculum maps, teachers can access their own curriculum work and step back and look at the work of other teachers who share the same students or disciplines.” 

A Seven-Step Process

According to Hayes Jacobs, the procedures for curriculum mapping follow a seven-phase model: 

• Phase 1: data collection
• Phase 2: first read-through, or a review of all maps by all teachers
• Phase 3: small mixed group review, during which groups of five to eight diverse faculty members share individual findings
• Phase 4: large group comparisons, where all faculty members gather to examine the findings of smaller groups
• Phase 5: identification of immediate revision points and a timetable for resolution
• Phase 6: identification of points requiring research and planning, and a timetable for resolution
• Phase 7: planning for next review cycle 

“Initial data collection is the most labor-intensive part of the curriculum-mapping process,” Hayes Jacobs noted, “but the payoff comes almost immediately as colleagues in a school begin to review the maps. When you have real data, you can clean up the gaps and repetitions that occur in the curriculum, identify potential areas for curriculum integration, and better align assessments with state and district standards.” 

Importantly, curriculum mapping is a continuous process, and Hayes Jacobs emphasizes that the process of reviewing and refining the maps should be continuous. “You never finish. But you’ve got a great database to work with,” she concluded, “and you’ll be communicating in a more timely way—and also, I hope, about an expansive, timely curriculum.”

Donna Eason