Curriculum Back mapping

The ultimate goal of any educational program is to ensure access to high quality curriculum and instruction for all students in order to meet or exceed content standards. This course is designed to help teachers develop focused, practical, and challenging curricula that integrate PLN frameworks to meet the needs and goals of students, teachers, and districts. Curriculum design is best accomplished through school-wide teacher reflection and discussion that brings about a coalescing of vision and reality. This course utilizes back mapping as the strategy to best facilitate this process, and entails systematic realization of a goal by working backwards from that goal. The PLN model merges the ideas of Hayes-Jacobs’ Curriculum Mapping and Wiggins and McTighes’ construct of Understanding by Design to merge performance assessments, state standards, and the PLN instructional frameworks to build focused, rigorous, creative, and engaging curricula. In this model, assessments drive instruction and course designers are challenged to consider not only what to teach, but why and how to teach successfully.