School Curriculum Mapping

[Daniel Riles]

Hello all,

My name is Dan Riles, and I am the Innovation Coach at The Meadowbrook School of Weston. We are a JK–8 school located in Weston, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston.

I’m reaching out because Meadowbrook is currently engaged in a curriculum mapping process, and I have two areas of interest related to this process.

1. How do you capture your work in Fab Labs and Maker Spaces in a school curriculum? 

• What tools do you use?
• What standards and benchmarks do you find helpful?
• How do collaborations show up in the curriculum?

2. What is your school's curriculum mapping process?

• What initiated your curriculum mapping process?
• How was your curriculum mapping process designed, and who was involved at each stage?
• Were any consultants or external partners involved in the process?
• What guiding principles, frameworks, or priorities shaped the development of your scope and sequence?
• What challenges did you encounter along the way, and what did you learn from those challenges?
• How is your curriculum map used in practice, and how often is it revisited or revised?

As we think about next steps for our own school, we are especially interested in learning from the experiences of others. If you have a particular experience you would like to share more fully, I would love to connect for a Zoom call.

I hope to share my findings back to this group as a resource for others.

Thank you so much for considering.

Sincerely,

Dan

[Mark Evans]

Hi Dan, 

I am just down the road @ Fay School in Southborough. We have had a curriculum mapping program in place for the last three years under the Atlas system. We have dedicated classes for things like Creators, Coding, and Robotics. Those things are mapped like other core subjects (Learning Goals, Essential Questions, Skills, Assessments, etc). For our interdisciplinary partnerships, we have had to be a bit more creative with metatags and keywords in the project/unit descriptors for the host courses. The scope and sequence documents aren't quite as linear as, say, a math course might be, but we try to err on the side of documentation over clear progression. 

Happy to talk more over Zoom, if you would like. It ain't perfect (and often messy), but we iterate, and try to keep our Maker documentation directional rather than prescriptive. 

Click to Book a time with me!

Mark Evans (he/his)

Director, Center for Creativity & Design 

Fay School

48 Main Street, Southborough, MA 01772

508-490-8386

fayschool.org