The Benefits of Curriculum Mapping

Are students actually learning what you’re teaching? How long does it really take to work through a unit of trigonometry? What knowledge and skills have students mastered, and what are they missing? Where should they be at the end of the school year—or their entire school journey?

Knowing the answers to these questions can inform everything from what you teach to how you teach it—within each classroom and across the whole school. But getting those answers can be difficult if you don’t have a strategy to plan student learning and measure its outcomes.

That’s where curriculum mapping shines.

What is curriculum mapping?

In short, curriculum mapping is a process where teachers, administrators, and other support staff come together to plan out goals for students throughout at each grade level. It sets the scope, sequence, and pace of learning, aligned across grades, subjects, and standards.

Curriculum mapping also provides a benchmark for classroom progress that teachers can use to make future curriculums more effective. It’s less about how you teach and more about what you teach and how you’ll track learning.

That covers the what—but what about the why?

Let’s look at the short- and long-term benefits of curriculum mapping for teachers, administrators, and students.

What are the short-term benefits of curriculum mapping?

Let’s start with the benefits of curriculum mapping within a single school year.

For teachers, curriculum maps help them tailor instruction to students and their learning goals as they progress throughout the year by:

• Crafting a student-first curriculum, laying out what students should know coming into the classroom and what they need to know when they leave
• Making better use of student and teacher time by eliminating redundancies, inconsistencies, and gaps in learning between different grade levels and subjects
• Measuring what they planned and what actually gets taught, in real-time, as each lesson progresses

For administrators, curriculum maps are a great way of getting everyone involved in student instruction on the same page by:

• Encouraging collaboration and communication between teachers who may otherwise not share ideas and resources
• Providing a transparent framework for teacher-to-student and administrator-to-teacher feedback and evaluation
• Addressing all standards and learning goals by mapping them directly to each grade, subject, and unit

For students, curriculum maps plot out a structured path of learning that moves smoothly from one level to the next by:

• Sharing what’s to come in the school year so they know their teacher’s expectations of them as they move from unit to unit
• Making sure instruction happens at a pace that supports other classroom activities while learning key concepts
• Providing opportunities to revisit and revamp the curriculum based on actual student performance

What are the long-term benefits of curriculum mapping?

Of course, the good news doesn’t stop there. The true magic of curriculum mapping happens when it becomes an established practice in your school.

For teachers, mapping curricula over the long term provides insights into how students learn and where to prioritize teaching by:

• Granting visibility into what actually happens in their classroom—and how it changes over time as teachers continue mapping
• Offering a built-in opportunity for reflection, innovation, and improvement about your classroom learning goals and how you achieve them
• Allowing teachers to prepare better lessons knowing exactly what students have learned in previous years and what the students will be learning next

For administrators, curriculum maps set the tone for learning across the entire school by:

• Re-establishing school culture by infusing each curriculum with your school’s priorities
• Ensuring continuity of instruction when a teacher leaves, allowing a new one to carry on with a roadmap in hand
• Creating a central pool of shared (and proven) knowledge, activities, assessments, and more that teachers can draw upon while planning lessons

For students, curriculum maps make learning more interesting, engaging, and achievable during their entire learning journey by:

• Ensuring consistency in learning, gaining the same knowledge and skills no matter who is teaching the class
• Connecting past learning to future instruction in a scaffolded approach to student achievement
• Facilitating personalized instruction

Get Started with Curriculum Mapping

Are you ready to map your way to a stronger curriculum? With the right tools, schools and districts can increase curriculum efficacy, improve student outcomes, and save teachers time.