CCP: Episode 50 // Curriculum Mapping Tips for Teachers
Let’s be real. We Have All been there.
…flying by the seat of your pants from unit to unit — Not a curriculum map in sight!
There were several years of teaching that I, for SURE, was flying by the seat of my pants when it came to my lesson plans. I didn’t know what I would be teaching next week, let alone a month down the road. Forget about mapping out the curriculum for my entire year — it just didn't happen.
Oh don’t get me wrong — I most DEFINITELY had that cute teacher planner — spent hours researching and picking it out, actually. But - the pages were still as crisp and untouched as the day I bought it.
Maaaaaybe I jotted down a quick lesson title, student activity, or start of a new unit every now and then, but most of the time… nadda.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the random pieces of paper that I had occasionally tucked here and there that resembled lesson planning of some sort, but I don’t think it counts if you can’t actually find the paper when you need it.
Sounds familiar? If so, then this podcast episode is for you.
Now, I understand that curriculum mapping typically isn’t something we (want to) talk about in January as we begin the second half of the school year. However, it’s actually a GREAT time to revisit curriculum mapping. You know your students better than you did at the beginning of the year, you know the pacing that works best for your students, AND you know what teaching strategies, types of activities, and projects that work well with your students.
In fact, January is the PERFECT time to dust off your teacher planning (digital or printable) and get crackin’ on curriculum mapping for the second half of the school year!
YOU’LL LEARN
(Timestamps Shown)
Curriculum mapping can be done anytime during the year (1:45)
How to tackle your mindset issues first (3:59)
How being a “systems” girl has been a game-changer for me (6:36)
A very simple template to help you stay organized (7:31)
How to treat curriculum mapping like a blueprint (8:00)
The process of Curriculum Mapping from beginning to end (10:41)
A few tips for success (13:11)
Why printing out the standards in a must (13:25)
How to make a “moveable” curriculum map (13:49)
How using Google Calendar might actually be BETTER than your cute teacher planner to keep track of things (16:40)
How to remain flexible when curriculum mapping (17:00)
LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Video Tutorial: How to Create a Curriculum Map for a Year
Video Tutorial: How to Use Google Calendar for Curriculum Mapping
REVIEW & SUBSCRIBE TO THE CLASSROOM COMMUTE PODCAST
Don’t miss a single episode. Subscribe to the podcast and you’ll get notified each week when a new episode gets dropped! And - if you love what you hear, I’d be so honored if you took a quick moment to rate and review the podcast so that other awesome teachers can find the podcast!
Transcript
Ep 50: Curriculum Mapping transcript powered by Sonix—easily convert your audio to text with Sonix.
Ep 50: Curriculum Mapping was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
As we begin this episode, I am super excited because we have reached Episode 50 of The Classroom Commute Podcast. We are halfway to 100 and it has been a crazy ride. When I started this podcast at the beginning of this year, January 2020, I had no idea what 2020 was going to bring. And boy, did it bring a lot. I am so glad to have had you to ride along with each week on your ride into school or maybe at the gym or wherever it is that you listen to the podcast. As we celebrate Episode 50 of the podcast, we are celebrating the last podcast episode to be released in 2020. I am geared up for 2021 and I can't wait to see what's in store. But first...Episode 50.
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey there. Welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, as always, I am Rachael your host. I am so glad that you are joining me today. We are days away from 2021. It is so crazy to believe! Of course, if you're not listening to this at the time of its recording, we might be well into the new year, but that's okay. I think this episode, wherever it finds you, whenever it finds you, you will find it valuable and hopefully have some great takeaways.
Today's topic is something that we often talk about at the beginning of the school year in August or September, whenever it is that you begin with your students. It's not something that we always talk about in January as we begin the second half of the school year. And that is Curriculum Mapping. Of course, this is something that we focus on at the beginning of the school year when you're planning out some long range plans. You might only be planning out for the first couple of months of school and that's completely okay. Sometimes you don't know the group of students that you're going to be working with and it makes sense to only plan a couple of months until you really get to know how long it's going to take to get through things and what kind of abilities your students are bringing in. By now, you have a really good understanding of where your students are at so it makes sense to revisit Curriculum Mapping and the things that you're going to be teaching for the second half of the school year.
Curriculum mapping for me is a little bit like meal planning. I hate meal planning at the beginning of the week. Week after week I sit down with my cookbooks, Pinterest, and all of the blogs that I get a lot of my recipes from. I plan out my week for what we're going to be cooking for dinner each night. I usually do it on Sunday afternoons when my two year old son is taking a nap and my six year old daughter is occupied with maybe a show, book, craft, or something. I have a little peace and quiet where I can sit down, plan and prepare. If there's anything that I hate more than meal prep is when it comes to making dinner each night and I have no idea what I'm making. And now I have two, very active, very awake, children running around my ankles wondering when we're going to eat and what we're going to eat. If I just take a little bit of time on Sunday afternoon before I go grocery shopping to plan all my meals, it sets me up for success for the rest of the week. And likewise, if you take a little time at the beginning of a month or at the start of a new semester to plan out what you're going to be teaching in your classroom, you will feel so much better once you actually get to those weeks and you know exactly what you're teaching and you're prepared to do it. I also know how overwhelming it can be. In this episode, I'm going to give you some tips for how to get into the mindset of Curriculum Mapping and a helpful, actionable process to help you do it. Let's dive right in.
I want to first tackle some mindset issues. We all get overwhelmed when we think about planning for an entire month or even an entire semester. That overwhelm is enough to make us just not want to do it in the first place. If we sit down and we think about exactly what we're doing and create a process out of it, it helps to minimize and hopefully eliminate some of that overwhelm. I first want to address some mindset shifts that you might want to make before you begin the Curriculum Mapping process. Much of the time when we think about what we're going to be teaching, we jump directly to the activities that we are going to be using to help teach the content. We have a topic in mind. We have a unit that we need to cover and we immediately start thinking what group projects the students are going to be doing or what books we might read aloud to our students. What happens when we do that is sometimes we get to the end of a unit and we didn't really cover the main skills and standards that our students need to have mastered by the end of the unit. Here's what we do instead. When you're Curriculum Mapping, you really want to begin with the end in mind. What I mean by that is you're going to start with your standards. These are the standards that your students need to master with each topic and content area that you're teaching your students. When we start with those standards, we're going to begin building lessons and activities surrounding those standards to help students build mastery of those skills. You want to ask yourself when you're done teaching this unit, what is the end result? What do you want your students to be able to do? Typically those results revolve around the standards that you want your students to have mastered. Then as we continue to work backwards, we're then going to be thinking about how we will assess the students on those standards. How will we know that they have actually met that standard and have mastered that skill? We don't want to give our students an assessment if it doesn't really give us any insight or information on how well a student is performing in a particular content area. It's really important that our assessments are authentic and serve the purpose to offer the teacher information about how each student is doing. Then you can begin thinking about the activities and the individual lessons that are going to get them to that end result. You see how that works? You start with the standards, with the end in mind, then you move backwards thinking about what assessments are going to help them reach those standards, and then you move backwards even more and you think about what activities are going to help them to learn the content so that they can perform well on the assessments so that they've shown you they've mastered the skills and the standards.
Let's put this in action. When you begin curriculum mapping for any length of time in your classroom, you're going to start with just one subject. You're going to work your way through the process that we just discussed. Then it's rinse and repeat. You just continue the same process for each subject, each unit, and each content area. You know I'm a systems girl, so I like to have a system in place so that I don't have to think about it when I start from square one each time. This is my system that I use and I hope that it helps you as well. Let's break it down and see this process in action.
One of the things that's going to make this process seem less overwhelming is if you get some tunnel vision and only think about one unit at a time. I know that you have multiple units to plan for and maybe multiple content areas but I want you to just focus on one unit at a time. When I begin the Curriculum Mapping process, I like to use a very simple template that helps me organize my thoughts all in one place. I have this template available to you in our Members Resource Library that you can grab as you begin the process as well. You can get to that by going to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/50 to grab this free template. I will be referencing this template through the rest of this episode so that you get an idea of how I use it so that you can then apply it to your own use.
Another important thing to note here is I do not hash out the actual lessons at this point. I'm just writing down a rough idea of what I want to do in the lessons themselves. I'm not actually writing the lesson plan. Think of this Curriculum Mapping process as your framework, your blueprint for what you're going to be doing once you've built your curriculum map and you know that you have created a map that will help your students reach those standards, then you can write individual lessons as needed. All right. I just wanted to point that out as we begin here today so that we are all on the same page.
Let's start Curriculum Mapping. Let's say you are teaching an opinion writing unit in your writers workshop. Now, following the process, we're going to start with the end in mind. That means starting with the skills and the standards that our students will need to have done and have mastered by the end of the unit to say that they have been successful in this unit. You'll need to refer to whatever set of standards your school abides by. That might be Common Core, it might be TEKS, whatever it is that your school requires you to use, that's where you're going to head first. Let's say the standards for 3rd grade opinion writing says that they need to be able to introduce the topic or text that they are writing about. They need to be able to state an opinion and create an organizational structure that lists reasons that came directly from the Common Core standards. Then they're also going to need to be able to provide reasons to support that opinion. Another standard says that they need to be able to use linking words and phrases, you know, the words like because, therefore, first, next, in order to connect their opinions and reasons. Then finally, the standards tell me that they need to be able to provide a concluding statement or section. These are the standards that I'm going to build my entire unit off of so that I know I stay on track and I make sure that I'm building assessments and lessons that will support these standards. On my Curriculum Mapping template, I actually record the standards right there on the template so that I don't have to go digging for them or reference them anywhere else. I have everything that I need in one spot and then I can easily use those standards and reference them when I am building the assessment that will show that they have reached that skill or standard. Speaking of assessment, I've decided that my assessment piece is going to have my students write a piece on 'Why conservation of the Earth is important'. I always did my opinion writing piece around Earth Day, so this worked out perfectly. It helped tie into the season and it was a great way for students to practice opinion writing. If you want to use the unit that I used for this, I'll link to it in the show notes. Now I've got my standards lined up. I know the assessment that I'm going to use to assess those standards.
Now I can begin building my lessons and activities. One of the things that I like to do when I'm building my Curriculum Map is to list out any anchor text that I want to use that are going to help support the standards and a rough idea of some activities that I want them to complete to help them master this concept of opinion writing. In this unit, one of the activities that I want my students to do is to read several books on Earth conservation and why it's important to take care of the Earth. As they're reading those books, I want them to record several facts that they are learning about why it's important, because, remember, that's our assessment is for them to be able to write why it's important to be mindful of taking care of the earth. I'm having them write some facts to support that on Post-it notes, and then I have them arrange their Post-it notes on a graphic organizer. Now, having taught this unit several times, the actual activity that students were doing was again reading several books, writing down Post-it notes, and then as they read several books, they would see the same fact mentioned in multiple texts. The students would overlap Post-it notes that were similar or the same as they created their graphic organizer. Then they would take those Post-it notes to help them develop reasons as to why it was important to take care of the Earth. As I'm looking at my curriculum map, that exact activity is going to help support the standard that they need to provide reasons to support their opinion. I always make sure that my activity points to the assessment, which points to the end result, the standard and skill that they need to master. Another activity that I might write down on my Curriculum Map is that I want a mini lesson on how to use linking words, because, again, that's a standard that they need to be able to master and how to add those linking words and phrases into their writing. Then the final activity, of course, is going to be able to complete a rough draft template that will help them to organize their thoughts before creating a final copy. One last thing that I like to include on my Curriculum Mapping template are any important vocabulary words that I want to make sure that I use and address and teach my students the meaning of while we're going through this unit. In this case, I would write down vocabulary words like persuade, fact, opinion, conservation, recycle. These are words that I want to use in my mini lessons and I also want them to use in their own writing. When I actually go to write the lesson plans themselves, I'm sure to include these. Maybe I have a word wall, however I want to introduce and reinforce these words, I make sure that I include that in the actual lesson plan itself.
All right. So that was me walking you through the process for one unit. Like I mentioned, you're going to rinse and repeat the same process with each unit in each content area. Now, I want to mention a few tips for success. As you begin this process, I suggest that you print out the standards for each content area that you will be teaching so that you can highlight, mark, or check the standard as you plug them into your curriculum. This is going to help you make sure that you've covered them all, that you're not leaving any standards neglected or just to keep you on track for what you still need to cover as you repeat the same Curriculum Mapping process throughout the year.
Another trick that I found helpful as I was Curriculum Mapping was to create a movable map. This is something that you're going to do after you have done that Curriculum Map template for all of your units and your topics, and then you're going to create a movable map. Here's what I mean, if you are a paper and pencil kind of person, you would write the name of each unit that you're teaching on a mini Post-it note, and then you're going to create a chart on some large chart paper, you're going to have the following columns. You're going to have a column for the month, and then you're going to have a column for each subject that you're teaching. If you're starting this in January, you might have a column that says January, February, March, and then you're going to have a column for math, reading, science social studies, and writing or whatever it is that you teach. Place the Post-it notes with all your math units on the months that you're going to be teaching them. Maybe in January you're going to be teaching multiplication. Then in February you want to move into division and March you're going to move into fractions. However it is that you are teaching your unit and then you're going to repeat that for every subject. What you've done here is you can see at a glance at a high level when you're going to be teaching which unit. This is helpful because then you can see how everything lines up and maybe you want to move things around a bit. For example, in 4th grade, I taught the American Revolution. I also had a novel unit called George Washington's Socks that I wanted to make sure that I was teaching around the same time because they complemented each other very nicely. By having a movable map you can see where certain units might line up to complement each other and you can move things around until it makes sense for what works for your classroom. Now, of course, some things aren't going to be movable. You have to teach certain topics in a specific order. But if you can rearrange them so that certain units across the curriculum are lined up to complement each other, it makes it that much better. Maybe you can arrange it so that you are doing informational writing at the same time that you're teaching animals in science so that your students can write about animals in their writing time just at the same time as they're learning about it in science.
Another thing to point out, is that if you do only teach one content area and you work with your grade level team and departmentalized, this would be a great thing to do with your team to create the movable map together so that you can see when your teammates are planning on teaching certain things and then you can move things around so that what you're teaching compliments what your teachers are teaching and so on. It also works well for special teachers like library or art. Is there something that they could potentially do in their classes that would complement what you're teaching in class? It's best to get as many people on board and collaborate so that you're all on the same page and that what you're teaching is going to complement and support what others are teaching.
Of course, you can do this digitally. You may know that I am a huge fan of Google Calendar. I have an entire video tutorial on how to use Google Calendar for Curriculum Mapping, and I will link to that in the show notes. If you are more of a digital person and you want to be able to collaborate that way or just keep track of things yourself. I will link to that video in the show notes, it's a good one.
My final tip, of course, is to always remain flexible and make notes as you're going through the second half of the year or whenever you're doing this process to make note of how your students are performing, how the pacing is going so that in future years you can make adjustments and modifications so that your Curriculum Map gets better and better as you go. You are able to fine tune it just a little bit each year.
All right, there you go. A little mini workshop on how to get into the mindset of Curriculum Mapping and how to develop a solid, repeatable process that you can do each time you sit down to create long range plans. Make sure you grab that template over in the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/50 to help get you organized and keep you organized as you are Curriculum Mapping. And finally, as we wrap up 2020, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for joining me each week on The Classroom Commute Podcast. Whether you've been with me for 2 episodes or all 50, I am so happy to have you along for the ride and to be part of your teaching journey. I hope you have a Happy New Year and I will see you in 2021. Bye for now.
Automatically convert your audio files to text with Sonix. Sonix is the best online, automated transcription service.
Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.
Sonix has the world's best audio transcription platform with features focused on collaboration. Automated transcription is better when you can easily collaborate and share the transcripts; our powerful permissioning system makes collaboration a breeze. Sonix can make your life a whole lot easier. Automated transcription can quickly transcribe your skype calls. All of your remote meetings will be better indexed with a Sonix transcript. Save time and money with automated transcription. Colleges and universities use Sonix to convert their lectures, classroom sessions, and research recordings to text.
Audio to text transcription just got more accurate. Do you have a lot of background noise in your audio files? Here's how you can remove background audio noise for free. Use Sonix to simplify your audio workflow. Researchers better analyze their interviews by transcribing their video and audio recordings with Sonix.
Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.
Sonix is the best online audio transcription software in 2020—it's fast, easy, and affordable.
If you are looking for a great way to convert your audio to text, try Sonix today.