Charting a Clear Course

Last year, the Monroe (CT) School District began laboring over what many districts are now wringing their hands about: curriculum mapping. Using comprehensive, easy-to-understand tables, curriculum mapping lays out what students are actually taught, and when —as opposed to what's supposed to be taught. For example, for a third-grade science unit on weather, the curriculum map would include the students' specific assignments—covering everything from thunderstorms to forecasting—as well as the skills those assignments address and the state standards that they meet. That way, what children learn from grade to grade and class to class can be streamlined, and the classroom curriculum can be more easily aligned with state standards.

Monroe Public Schools' Superintendent Norman Michaud wanted to know if his schools were meeting the state's K–12 teaching requirements, but he found all the paperwork cumbersome. So he asked Ed Montagnino, the district's head of information services and technology, and Richard Canfield, director of instructional services and professional development, to find a way to electronically chart what was being taught. They ended up creating eMAP, a curriculum-mapping system that uses Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Access software. Now, any educator in the district can access the school's curriculum in each subject area from anywhere in the school or from home. There's also access to online resources, such as links to databases listing all state requirements for each grade and subject.

Educational consultant Heidi Hayes Jacobs, who's recognized as the leading authority on curriculum mapping, calls the process "putting together the big picture." For example, with a school's maps in place, fourth-grade teachers can adjust their lessons to reflect what third-graders have already learned and what fifth-graders are expected to know. That's when library media specialists step in.

Jacobs, who is the author of Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum & Assessment K–12 (Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 1997), believes that librarians have a critical role to play when a school plots its curriculum. "They are the master teachers of research in a building, not only for kids but for the staff as well," she says. By mapping, teachers can hyperlink specific units, or subjects, to specific curriculum-rich Web sites that dovetail with classroom teachings.

Laura Grosvenor, a media specialist at Kimball Elementary School in Seattle, WA, assumed a leadership role in her school when she mapped her library's information-literacy curriculum. "I began using [the maps] as a way to correlate what I was doing with teachers, but we soon realized that everyone in the school needed to see what others were doing," she explains.

Grosvenor says that one instance in particular showed the importance of curriculum mapping. The subject of Native Americans was being taught at several grade levels, but after Grosvenor and the classroom teachers compared notes, they discovered that second-grade teachers were approaching the subject from the settler's perspective, while fourth-grade teachers were approaching it from a Native American perspective. Grosvenor's solution was to develop a program for third-grade teachers that brought together the two perspectives.

Not all school districts are fortunate to have people like Montagnino and Canfield to create curriculum-mapping software or enthusiastic librarians like Grosvenor to launch a mapping project. In fact, electronic curriculum mapping is a fairly new phenomenon. It's not clear how many institutions use mapping software, but vendors say hundreds of schools and districts are buying a growing number of software programs each year. Several companies have stepped in with Web-based curriculum-mapping software designed to make the process simpler.

Last year, Portland, OR-based Rubicon released Rubicon Atlas, an 18-month-old Internet curriculum-mapping service that has 1,000 schools as clients. The company claims Rubicon Atlas is guided by Jacobs's principles. To see a demonstration of how the service works, visit www.rubiconatlas.com/demopages/demo_intro.htm; the service varies in price, ranging from $3 to $10 annually per student.

The Bismarck (ND) School District recently purchased Rubicon Atlas, and its media specialists are full participants in the mapping process. John Salwei, the district's assistant superintendent, says that when administrators decided to chart their curriculum, an Internet-based service was a must. "We wanted better alignment with [state] standards and benchmarks," he says. "We're fragmented and disjointed, just like every other school district in this country, and we wanted the best tool we could get our hands on."

But there are other ways to record your curriculum electronically. WestJam Enterprises of Westmost, IL, offers a Web-based service called the Curriculum Mapper (www.curriculummapper.com). James Westrick, a managing partner, says teachers want curriculum maps to be a snap to fill out, but they also want extra features, such as being able to place state standards into the document with one click, which make the software less user friendly. "Curriculum mapping is supposed to be quick and easy, but if you keep adding fields and features, it becomes too cumbersome," he says. WestJam, however, plans to add an option that will allow teachers to link lesson plans and sample assignments to the maps.

Marco Zumbolo, a technology director for a board of cooperative educational services (BOCES) for five New York counties, is a fan of the Curriculum Mapper and says WestJam has been very accommodating. "We asked for a spell checker, and they included one," he says. "I've asked for more rights as a district administrator, and they gave them to me." Although BOCES's curriculum mapping has gone well, says Zumbolo, the hardest part is getting teachers to enter all of the data onto their maps.

Districts that use electronic mapping say it makes educators' lives easier while assuring that kids aren't missing out on important instruction. "The process of thinking through what you want to teach and comparing it to your curriculum is really useful, no matter what software you use," Montagnino insists. "The nice part of putting [the curriculum] online is that it isn't a paper document that gets dusty on a shelf—it's a live document that we're changing over time."