Curriculum Mapping 101
with Janet Hale

Janet Hale shares her expertise and recommendations for creating quality essential questions to be used in your initial or ongoing curriculum mapping initiatives.

Watch this webinar on-demand below!

Janet Hale

Creating Quality Essential Questions

Essential questions are a common element in curriculum mapping, yet teachers are oftentimes asked to develop them when they have not had any or sufficient training in this process. This informative session will provide an understanding of essential questions for the purpose of curriculum mapping, with approaches and strategies to create quality essential questions that help drive student engagement and long-term learning.

This webinar will highlight:

  • Difference among types of questions asked in classrooms

  • Criteria for designing quality essential questions

  • Process for creating and using essential questions through alignment across grade levels

Speaker Details

Janet Hale
Janet Hale
Janet Hale is passionate about supporting educators in making curriculum decisions that ensure, enhance, and enrich learning and teaching experiences. She specializes in curriculum mapping; curriculum design using various models and frameworks, and standards literacy and alignment. She has taught in elementary, secondary, and special-education classrooms, as well as worked with curriculum, instruction, and assessment leadership for over 30 years. Janet’s knowledge and insights are both strategic and practical. She has written several professional books published by ASCD and Corwin Press, including A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Planning, Implementing, and Sustaining the Process and An Educational Leader’s Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating and Sustaining Collaborative Cultures. Janet is currently staying busy aiding schools and districts with prioritizing standards and determining critical learning focuses.
Kynan Gallagher
Kynan Gallagher
Kynan Gallagher is Product Manager at Chalk, where he works with teachers and education leaders to create solutions focused on planning, organizing and analyzing curriculum. He has several years experience supporting hundreds of schools across the world in getting their curriculum mapping projects underway.

Why Curriculum Map?

Increase in student achievement. Teachers who have a better understanding of the curriculum will be more flexible in their teaching methods. They will be able to ensure their students completely understand important concepts by structuring classes around the big picture.

Create a school’s identity or persona. Curriculum maps help to create a bridge between standards and lesson plans, by bringing new resources into the classroom. This has implications on every stakeholder within the school district community. New initiatives, such as STEM or design thinking, that districts take on can be referenced directly in the curricular units to provide evidence of the work.

Encourages collaboration. Curriculum maps encourage teachers to discuss best practices and share resources, improving the overall level of teaching across the school district. Parents benefit from structured curriculum maps in that they know the exact learning targets for their children. Students are given coherent curriculum throughout the class, with a constant flow of knowledge from term to term and year to year.

Build a common resource center. Being able to capture assessments, lesson plans, and best practices within one place can improve teachers instruction. Knowledge can be easily shared from a master teacher to a new teacher. Within a curriculum map, the outcome is a comprehensive resource pool that includes hyperlinks to resources in context.

Save money on textbooks. Schools can save money by creating their own curriculum maps rather than buying them from textbook publishers. This allows for more control over what is actually being taught at the school

Learn how to map, implement, and sustain a guaranteed viable curriculum for your school. Get the FREE E-Book →

What is Chalk?

Simple and Easy to Use

Chalk is an intuitive, simple, and easy-to-use curriculum and lesson planner. Designed for the modern era, teachers appreciate the simplicity and how easy it is to adopt.

Connect C & I

Go beyond just curriculum mapping. Chalk connects your curriculum directly to lesson planning. Teachers can plan their lessons with full access to the unit and curriculum.

Real Time Collaboration

Curriculum is written and collaborated upon in teams. Chalk enables real-time collaboration when editing curriculum and units. Co-edit with teachers and staff to perfect your curriculum.

Complete the form below to speak with a sales rep

Hear from school leaders on their journey with Chalk

Why curriculum mapping matters and how to pull it off

By Jennifer Mitchell, Curriculum and Professional Development Coordinator, Mifflin County School District

A common misconception about curriculum mapping is that teachers and administrators just need to come together once or twice a year to rewrite the curriculum, pick the resources they will use, and then they’re done. The problem with this approach is that the written curriculum will quickly fall into disuse, never to be revisited. By contrast, effective curriculum mapping entails recording what teachers are actually teaching, whether it’s aligned with standards, how it is impacting student achievement, and determining what needs to be updated and improved…

SmartBrief logo

Expediting curriculum mapping in an under-resourced district

By Mike Hummel, Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment, Mount Union Area School District

In our small, rural district in Huntington County, Pennsylvania, we face a number of challenges including a high rate of poverty, a rather pronounced teacher shortage, and a limited budget. Given these challenges, education technology is a resource we can’t afford to go without. For instance, just 18 months ago, we had no central place where our curriculum was housed, revised, or accessible to students or to the public. We had no effective way to track what we were teaching, whether our courses were aligned to state standards, and if teachers were adequately addressing those standards…

eSchool News logo