Comparing Mapping, Guides and Plans

Differences between Mapping, Plans, and Guides

Click the links below to discover the difference between Curriculum Mapping, Pacing Guides and Lesson Plans

Curriculum Mapping

Lesson Plans

Pacing Guides

Lesson Plans

Lesson plans are the day-to-day instruction methods and strategies used to teach students the concepts and standards in the curriculum maps. Teachers create plans based on their students’ needs and ways they learn in order to help their students achieve mastery in the subject or grade level skill/ standard. These are daily plans on how the teacher will teach the content to their students (Hale, 2018). Lesson plans contain 6 key compontent according to Bri Stauffer of iCEV. These include: lesson objectives, related requirements, lesson materials, lesson procedure, assessment method, lesson reflection (Stauffer, 2019). Each of the six elements play a crucial role in creating effective daily lesson plans. Overall, lesson plans are need everyday for teachers to create and follow as a way to organize what will be taught and how it will be taught in order to see student success and mastery.

Pacing Guides

Pacing Guides are organized documents created to plan out the lessons, standards, and curriculum throughout the school year. They are used a guide to ensure teachers are following standards and lesson goals and that the students are progressing through content. It divides the curriculum into weeks and months as a way to visually see the school year (Cescon, 2022). They provide structure to each unit of study. Using the backwards design model helps teachers see where they need to be at the end of each unit to assess student mastery. Then, they can plan the lessons and instruction needed for students to accomplish the learning objectives and goals. Depending on the length and time of the instruction, teachers plan out how many weeks/ months each unit will take to teach and assess and then create a pacing guide that organizes the school year full of teaching and learning.

Curriculum Mapping

Curriculum mapping is a structured and systematic way to organize the concepts being taught, how they are being taught and when they are being taught. It is a way for teachers to visually see the alignment of the course content goals and the instructional path to achieve these goals. As a result, teachers are able to clearly identify any academic gaps that may appear through the map-like structure of information. In latin the word “curriculum” refers to “the course, the path, the road” (Archambault & Masunaga, 2015). Therefore, mapping out the standard goals to form a pathway of learning that leads to mastery is the outcome of creating a curriculum map. The maps incorperate the learning aspect of education. What are the students learning? How are they learning that? What essential questions, objectives, and standards play in the role of the learning? (Hale, 2018). All of these questions are answered in curriculum maps as teachers create a course or unit of action that defines what students will learn, when they will learn it and how that learning looks. It is a visual tool used for teachers to refer back to throughout the year to ensure students and teachers are on track to meeting the learning goals.