Step 2: Identify Primary Map Components
Part of the Facilitation Team’s role is ensuring that maps provide meaningful guidance on teachers’ instructional practices and provide some details about instructional strategies.
Make Maps Meaningful
Try these strategies to support each team, beginning with the Pilot Team, with articulating the critical aspects of its map:
- Make a distinction between the Skills and Activities columns of the map. Skills are what students need to demonstrate, while Activities are what the teacher instructs. In addition, have staff examine the statements within each unit and ask these questions:
- Do Skills clearly identify how students will demonstrate their understanding of concepts, particularly through higher-order thinking skills such as those in the Common Core standards (e.g., demonstrate, explain, formulate, analyze, use, compare, contrast, evaluate)?
- Do Activities capture what the teacher instructs (e.g., use, apply, explain, explore)?
- Do Activities enable students to practice skills and apply concepts multiple times for mastery (e.g., describe, practice, identify, explain)?
- Identify other components to capture in the maps. To ensure that a curriculum map meets a school’s needs and truly integrates the theme, teachers might want to add, for example, components about Pedagogical Approaches or Real-World Connections, or other components that are meaningful to the team.
