Day Four Task – Curriculum Mapping

In our session together we talked about a curriculum mapping

exercise. To remind you, a curriculum map takes the overall
expressed intentions of a whole course of study, such as the major
in a degree, and checks each course to see how it contributes to
the achievement of those intentions (e.g. if one goal is to develop
critical thinking, which teaching and which assignments actually
focus on achieving that?)

Go to this website from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and

read more about the
process: http://manoa.hawaii.edu/assessment/howto/mapping.htm

Note that in their map they map the progressive work that students
do to develop a skill, with I, R and M.

Section 4 shows how a curriculum mapping exercise can be useful

to the work of an academic department – do you agree with this?

Think about the courses that are used for the qualification that you
are teaching in (i.e., maybe you teach two or three courses in your
major –what do you know about the other courses?). Use the work
on a Graduate Profile that you did in our session, and see if you
can make a map of how all of your courses, and any of the other
courses that you know about, contribute to achieving these goals.

Do you find any gaps? Do you think you know enough about what
other teachers teach the students in your major? How do you find
this out? Discuss the map you have made and the value of the
process.

… and complete a syllabus grid for the Overall Task, giving

headings that indicate the threads you identify as important in your
course, with each relevant section filled in to indicate the activities
in the unit that will be keeping that thread going (remember, you
may have some blanks, as not all threads necessarily appear in
each unit).
It’s quite difficult for teacher to teach all the courses in a program
because each teacher has his or her own strengths; however,
teacher should know enough about what other teachers teach the
students in the major. The reason are some courses have
connections to other courses and if teachers knows enough about
other courses, they can help students to prepare for the next
stages of their learning.
The curriculum map should be published and distributed to all
faculty members and students, so that they can know, follow and
design their teaching and learning plans.
I’ve made a map for Tourism English major. It was somehow
confused and difficult at first because this was the first time I had
to do this work, but later I understand the nature of the curriculum
map and made it easier. The mapping process helps me to know
more about other courses in my major program, the relationship
among them and which courses would support for the others…