Sometimes, you get things right. It is always good to receive positive feedback. Recently, this has happened with me in terms of curriculum mapping. It is something that I believe in strongly, in terms of communicating what the curriculum should be.
Sometimes, confirmation just takes a while to happen. I work on several long term projects. One of those long term projects is the implementation of curriculum mapping. I’ve set up an electronic system to map and communicate our curriculum. We used TODCM as the basis for our implementation. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore.
We set the system up a couple of years ago. We heavily tweaked the system so that it would work for both elementary and secondary teachers. My constant pitch is that this has to work for classroom teachers. I don’t really care if it works for administrators or not, it has to work for teachers in the classroom. The system was largely born out of my visit to a kindergarten class. I was there to help a teacher with an iPad question. I watched the teacher for a few minutes. The lesson was engaging and high quality. I made a comment to her about what a nice lesson that it was. Her response was “I spent all weekend finding the lesson…” I thought that is was terrible that a teacher would have to spend a weekend looking for curriculum and lessons. We have several excellent kindergarten teachers. Shouldn’t they be able to easily share lessons?
Elementary teachers have very different needs than secondary teachers. TODCM, which we renamed DEC (Dearborn Educational Curriculum) is set up much better for secondary teachers than elementary. Each course is mapped to a subject area, thus secondary is a natural fit. We had to redo elementary by marking periods and make each marking period a different subject so that elementary teachers could see all subject areas at once.
Recently, I was informed that we needed to do some additional work on DEC. Not so much we, but the curriculum committees. It seems that teachers are now using DEC and have noticed that it is inconsistent in terms of quality of resources. (I’ve been pushing for more curriculum work for a while.)
Here’s the good news. We are now taking additional steps toward making the curriculum more consistent and more conveniently discoverable for teachers. This has taken longer than I would’ve liked, but it is another step in the right direction. Having curriculum committees review and agree on what the curriculum really should be is an important step. Making that curriculum available for all teachers is just as important.
All too often in the past, everyone “knew” what the curriculum was, but rarely did two people “know” the same thing. Now, we have the opportunity to easily have everyone looking at the same material. Additionally, we can identify those exemplary lessons and share those with all appropriate teachers.
Now the system is far from perfect. There are some technical issues that we can improve upon. However, the biggest improvement that we can make is in determining exactly what classroom teachers would like it be. I will be exploring that this Spring through some focus feedback groups.
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