K-8 Schools
Elementary schools find Curriculum Trak to be a helpful solution for organizing school-wide curricular decisions. The web-based platform can help you coordinate collaboration efforts, ensure student preparedness for high school, and meet your specific mission. Our partnerships with high-quality content providers expedites your mapping efforts and provides opportunities for the teacher to grow in their instructional practices.
Why Mapping?
How can a school put together a team plan that is collaborative, ongoing, and moves them toward their mission? People and planning are the two keys, and curriculum mapping has become an essential practice for schools who are intentional about the learning outcomes of their students. The process and product of mapping helps realize a school’s mission and is a vital part of being an effective learning organization:
Mission:
Schools need to formulate a coherent, written planning map of how their mission turns into reality at the unit and lesson levels in each classroom.
Collaboration:
The planning map must be collaboratively developed and be coherent within and between grade levels and courses. To accomplish this, a shared, transparent planning map is crucial. Team members must be able to understand how their planning map fits into a larger plan/map of instruction.
Alignment:
The planning map must be developed in alignment with a developmentally appropriate sequence of instruction which is commonly captured in sets of standards and benchmarks. Alignment with standards ensures that there are not instructional gaps, excessive redundancies, or duplication of effort by team members. Schools seeking accreditation must demonstrate standards alignment in their reporting.
Improvement:
The planning map allows team members to revisit it after implementation, to reflect on the effectiveness of the original planning map and to make needed revisions. It can inform the team on the need to change teaching materials, improve strategies, sharpen assessments, and make needed improvements in the curriculum or instructional process on the part of individual teachers.
Communication:
The planning map aids internal communication between all school staff, and can also be shared with parents, students, and other interested parties via the school website. In addition, network sharing of planning maps allows users to search, view, copy, and collaborate with educators at other schools throughout the world.
Legacy/Support:
Articulation via a planning map captures current practice, so when a staff member leaves or retires, a coherent planning map is left behind as part of the larger team plan. This not only helps preserve and solidify instructional quality and progress, but provides a vital roadmap to the incoming teacher. Instructional program quality and continuity can be maintained and enhanced if there is a quality planning map in place.
Integration:
Planning maps increase the likelihood of solid curricular design and can lead to the deeper integration of disciplinary areas by staff. This benefits students as they can more readily see the connectedness of all knowledge and be stimulated in their learning.
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Why Curriculum Trak?
Curriculum Trak is attractive to faith-based schools due to four main factors: positive user experiences, built-in content that expedites the mapping process, unique features that can be found only in our software, and mission-directed service.