Blog Post, Session 10

How can curriculum mapping assist you?  Do you have one?  Does your school/district curriculum map?  Where would/will you start in creating a useful curriculum map for your classroom? 

 I would love to do curriculum mapping, but we don't have that as part of our school. As I said on the webinar last week, as a student I got a lot out of my History/Literature curriculum map as a Junior. It truly makes sense for a Junior English class to blend with a U.S. History course as the crux of Junior English is based on American Literature. (I guess since Arizona dropped AIMS, it's no longer required but I still do it.) When I taught at AAEC, I tried to get the U.S. History teacher to curriculum-map with me and it didn't go well --he wasn't remotely interested in working with me, probably because he didn't want to have to adjust his curriculum to work in a team. It was kind of a bad experience so I've been a little gun-shy about asking at a new school, but it's something to look forward to.

Another subject I've been thinking about working with is the science department: they have been requiring essays recently and my students have been asking me to proofread for them. I don't mind doing this, of course, but many of the questions center around MLA8, so I've been thinking about setting up a Moodle page just to have MLA resources available to all teachers who may use that citation method. This would help all Humanities courses, of course, but if the science teachers accept MLA rather than APA (as I understand they do at our school), this would help cut back on many of the questions they field so they can focus more on answering questions with regard to critical thinking. That's the plan --now to have the time to work on it ;)