How do teachers know what to teach

That is the way that I was taught to plan a unit by my cooperating teacher, Keri Crocco , during my student teaching experience. At its core, curriculum mapping challenges educators to think about the larger goal they want to achieve. Then they create a map for how they are going to get there, how long it will take to get there, what tools are needed to get there, and what assessments will validate whether or not the intended goal has been reached successfully.

I have created several curriculum maps for individual units of study — often referred to as horizontal mapping — that my students and I work on in my English Language Arts classes. This level of teamwork acts as not only a tool for building staff capacity, but also as a comprehensive professional development program.

In more recent years, school districts have purchased scripted curriculums that require adjusting the prescribed curriculum to meet the needs of the students. In my experience with curriculum mapping, it is more difficult to re-work a scripted curriculum than it is to build a curriculum map from the ground up.

Some of what I noticed was more time intensive. One colleague did minute morning meetings and ended the day with a short reflection, asking kids to share one thing that went well that day and possibly one goal they were working on for the remainder of the week. I knew I wanted to model myself after these teachers, so I made a gradual, conscious shift—changing my priorities to make my relationships with students my main focus. I started out with a morning meeting.

This was something I could implement easily. I started to gather my students in a circle at the beginning of the day. We did different class greetings and then had either a game or a discussion. Making this shift changed me as a teacher, and it changed the vibe in my classroom. I began to feel happier at school, and I could see that my students were happier too. They were more prepared to tackle the day.

They trusted me and felt more comfortable asking questions and taking risks. They were reaching out for help and clarification more than ever before. The discipline problems I had been having started to decrease, and honestly, the school day was so much more enjoyable for all of us. We were building trust and friendships, and the students knew that I was on their side and willing to help.

Parents would reach out more, and I started to hear that kids really enjoyed being in my class. For example, when I teach a physical education lesson I know the importance of using my whistle if I have a large number of students in an open area, and will also know the importance of teaching specific aspects of certain skills, or simply focus on game sense and fun.

This, I expect, is different in science or art. In art, the focus is more on the techniques used, the aesthetics of the finished product and the meaning conveyed in this product. In addition to these, the standard also identifies teaching strategies that help to utilise information communication technology ICT to make the content more relevant and meaningful to the students. For example, in English you might use ICT to have students contact the author of a novel to further their knowledge of how certain themes influenced their writing process, or in science you may connect to the live feed from the NASA space station and have students discuss activities that they see.

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