The Aspirational Curriculum Map: A Diagnostic Model for Action-Oriented Program Review

Abstract

When the process of curriculum mapping begins with the faculty’s articulations of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students should master upon graduation, a curriculum map results that enables faculty to review the curriculum for effectiveness, see the workings of the whole curriculum at a glance, plan assessments, and recognize where adjustments or changes need to be made. This article explains these benefits and lays out a step by step process for building such a curriculum map that can be adapted to any institutional context. We also describe a variety of outcomes from and reactions to our process.

Keywords: assessment, administration, organizational development, programs

Introduction

A well designed curriculum map and the process that goes into developing it have much to offer academic programs reviewing their curricula as part of a larger program review effort. Faculty are often energized when discussing big picture learning goals for the program and benefit from seeing visual representations of the curriculum as a whole, where they can see how their particular courses fit into the program. Students and advisors can also benefit from the big picture perspective of the curriculum: when students wonder why they must take a certain course—particularly if the course seems especially difficult or uninteresting to them—advisors can demonstrate how the course contributes to the overall learning for the degree. The process of creating a curriculum map can also encourage dialogue among faculty groups teaching the same course about which program wide goals and outcomes the course should address. The completed map offers a succinct list of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes the faculty consider most important for students to learn while at the same time indicating which desired learning is perhaps not addressed, poorly addressed, or even overaddressed by a program’s required courses. Furthermore, the map can show whether the curriculum is working in a logical manner, such that novice level learning is positioned early in the curriculum, while more advanced learning happens later.

As educational developers at a large, Midwestern, research university, we facilitate curriculum mapping as a part of our work in our university’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), with one of us dedicated and housed specifically in the business school. While each of us has taught or is currently teaching, none of us is full time faculty; rather, each of us routinely consults with faculty about teaching and learning while individually participating in or overseeing a wide variety of initiatives and organizations related to college level teaching and learning. Over the more than 15 years all of us have worked in the CTL (or business school), we have built relationships among the faculty, resulting in confidence and trust in—or at least familiarity with—our work, a condition that has eased our task of leading curriculum mapping efforts for the university.

Over the past five years, high level administrators as well as department and program chairs have frequently asked us to use curriculum mapping as a component of program review as well as for program development and learning goal setting. We have led the curriculum mapping process for 70 distinct departments and degree granting programs on our own campus as well as at other campuses in our state, nationally, and internationally. The disciplines have ranged from Business to Environmental Studies, from Jazz Studies to Law, and from Public Administration to Comparative Literature. We have facilitated for large programs with upward of 150 instructors to small programs with 4 instructors, and we have worked with faculty who were excited and eager to map their curricula as well as skeptical faculty who needed to be convinced of the usefulness of curriculum maps. Over the years of doing this work, we have honed a process for creating curriculum maps that we would like to share here. In addition, we will explain how aspirational, diagnostic, action oriented curriculum maps work and how they can be powerful tools for improving the curriculum and ultimately student learning.

Review of the Literature

The curriculum mapping process began in K 12 education as a tool to visualize and review a curriculum to ensure that what was taught in the classroom was aligned with state or national standards (English, 1980). It spread to higher education as part of the program assessment movement (Allen, 2004; Harden, 2001; Huba & Freed, 2000; Sumsion & Goodfellow, 2004). The rationale underlying curriculum mapping arose from the notion of multiple curricula: the declared or written curriculum, that is, what a program says it teaches, or the curriculum given by national standards or accrediting organizations; the taught curriculum, that is, what is actually taught; the learned curriculum, that is, what students learn; and the assessed curriculum, that is, how students’ learning is measured. Curriculum mapping was seen as one way to ensure alignment and consistency among these curricula (Harden, 2001; Kopera Frye, Mahaffy, & Svare, 2008; Robley, Whittle, & Murdoch Eaton, 2005).

While there is general agreement on the advantages of creating a curriculum map, there is less clarity in the literature concerning what information to include in the map and how to organize it. Curriculum maps have been as simple as lists of courses that address particular program goals (e.g., Adam, Zosky, & Unrau, 2004; Essary & Statler, 2007) or as complex as multidimensional concept maps (e.g., Harden, 2001). Several researchers have described curriculum maps similar in content and organization to the maps used in our process: a grid with program goals along one axis, courses or learning opportunities along the other axis, and information in the cells of the grid that describes whether and how each course addresses each goal (Allen, 2004; Mabin & Marshall, 2011; Maki, 2012).

There also appears to be a lack of consistency concerning the methods for creating curriculum maps, specifically for generating program goals. Some authors recommend that goals should arise from dialogue about, or a review of, documents describing the current curriculum (e.g., Allen, 2004; Maki, 2012). In other contexts, the goals may be provided by a professional accrediting organization (e.g., ABET for engineering, AACSB for business schools, APA for psychology programs; Essary & Statler, 2007; Mabin & Marshall, 2011; Robley et al., 2005; Sumsion & Goodfellow, 2004). Finally, we have worked with several schools that have collected syllabi and mined them to generate goals for the curriculum (Allen, 2004).

Other authors more closely aligned with our method suggest that learning goals should be based on the faculty’s ideas about what graduates of their program should know and be able to do (e.g., Allen, 2004; Harden, 2001). Not only does such an approach yield aspirational goals for the program, it also leverages faculty’s natural interest in their discipline. In our experience working with hundreds of faculty members, an invitation to negotiate and articulate the disciplinary knowledge students should acquire in the program’s curriculum as well as what students should be able to do with that knowledge enhances the faculty’s interest and engagement with the mapping process. Instead of reacting to preexisting internal or external statements or plotting out a curriculum map based solely on the content of individual courses, faculty members engage their well honed intellectual interests and values to articulate a shared vision of the high level goals and learning outcomes to which the program should aspire. This sort of visionary work on the part of the faculty, when coupled with a mandate and accountability from high level administrators or accrediting bodies, has resulted in an environment where faculty attending scheduled meetings and programs complete their maps on time.

A Case for Aspirational, Diagnostic, Action Oriented Curriculum Maps

As frequent users of the systematic approach of backward course design (Fink, 2003; Walvoord & Anderson, 1998; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), we employed a similarly systematic approach to curriculum mapping, beginning with the aspirational end in mind (i.e., the knowledge, skills, and attitudes a graduate of the program should have). At the same time, we wanted to challenge faculty to break down and articulate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they had long since internalized as experts so that novices (i.e., students) could understand exactly what they needed to practice and master in order to achieve the desired learning in the field, a process known as “Decoding the Disciplines” (Shopkow, Diaz, Middendorf, & Pace, 2013).

When the articulations resulting from this process are then plotted against the program’s required courses, a map emerges that lays out the cognitive, metacognitive, and procedural knowledge that competent practitioners should possess and enact. The curriculum map becomes a visual representation of the courses that help students learn a program’s core processes and competencies. For faculty, the chance to reflect upon and reconsider the kind of thinking that attracted them to their discipline in the first place can be energizing.

Perhaps even more important to faculty engagement, however, is the order in which the map is created. The process begins with the articulation of program learning goals followed by the determination of each goal’s concomitant student learning outcomes without regard to the current curriculum. When faculty are suddenly liberated to think big and idealistically about their discipline, program goals are aspirational. What they are teaching or what such and such a course is “covering” is tabled in favor of deeper considerations of what competencies are most important in a given discipline. What should graduates be able to do as new yet competent practitioners?

When the program’s required courses are plotted against the answers to this question, a clear and easily read visual depiction emerges of how well (or how poorly) the curriculum addresses its goals and learning outcomes. Typically, the resulting map reveals places in the curriculum where certain learning goals and outcomes are overaddressed or redundant, where others are addressed thinly or not at all, where courses appear to offer students little toward the programmatic goals, or where courses are carrying too much curricular responsibility. Curriculum maps created in this manner are diagnostic and action oriented. As such, curriculum maps that begin with a program’s learning goals and outcomes offer new insights about the curriculum that make clear when there is a need for further work on the curriculum and clearly define the nature of that work.

Finally, and perhaps available to faculty more intuitively than explicitly, curriculum maps as we envision them point to a pedagogical approach undergirded by learner centered theories (Barr & Tagg, 1995). If a curriculum is defined in terms of what students must be able to think, do, and feel to achieve program goals, then courses in that curriculum will be organized around those activities that help students process the knowledge and practice the skills they must master. It offers them the opportunity to actively engage in making the knowledge their own so that it will endure. Furthermore, if a curriculum is defined as what students must be able to do, then it makes more sense to take a learner centered and active learning approach to the use of precious class time. And if a course is geared toward helping students achieve the program’s learning goals and outcomes, it becomes more likely that the content will become the vehicle by which students process, practice, and reflect upon the discipline’s way of knowing. Although it would be an overstatement to say that our approach to program review and curriculum mapping alone can transform instruction from a content coverage model into an outcome oriented, learner centered model (Doyle, 2011; Tagg, 2003; Weimer, 2013), we believe our approach promotes the latter because it places front and center descriptions of what students must do. When faculty indicate which learning outcomes their courses address, they necessarily consider what students should do, not the content they, the faculty, will cover.

A Curriculum Mapping Process

We turn now to the specific steps and procedures of our approach to curriculum mapping so that colleagues interested in this work will have another example of how it is done at one institution. In providing this example, we do not intend to suggest that the operational specifics of our approach are appropriate for every institution. Indeed, we hope colleagues will review the steps of our approach (Figure 1) and then adapt them to their local context. At our institution, we typically begin the conversation with our faculty by defining the parameters of curriculum maps:

• Curriculum maps evidence the efficacy of a program’s curriculum.

• Programs grant degrees such as a B.A. in French, a B.S. in Biology, or an MBA.

• The program review process maps the courses in the curriculum of the degree program chosen for review.

We also suggest that program heads (e.g., chairs, deans, directors) select faculty to serve on a Curriculum Review Committee. Faculty members who are knowledgeable about their program’s curriculum, respected among their colleagues, and who are recognized as leaders in their program are ideal candidates. The purpose of the committee is not necessarily to do the work of mapping the curriculum but rather to review completed maps, analyzing, deliberating, and finally deciding what actions should be taken to improve the curriculum based on the information presented by the map.

Also in our initial conversation with key administrators, we make it clear that many, if not all, faculty members need guidance to complete the curriculum map. It is important to recognize that such efforts require time, resources, and, most importantly, leadership. Specifically, the responsibility of ensuring cooperation among all faculty members falls to the program head and not the educational developers, who primarily facilitate the mapping process with faculty. Since the faculty in the program must accomplish most of the work, the success of the process hinges on the effort faculty are willing to devote to the enterprise (Sumsion & Goodfellow, 2004). We also make it clear that reviewing the map and taking action are essential to the success of the mapping process, and we suggest that an appropriate leader coordinate that effort for the Curriculum Review Committee, often along with an educational developer in a consulting role.

We have found that mapping works best when faculty are given time to reflect on the work, share it with their colleagues, and come to thoughtful conclusions along the way. In that regard, it is the responsibility of the Curriculum Review Committee to communicate to all faculty within the program the decisions being made and to receive full departmental approval as each step is completed. Generally speaking, curriculum mapping follows a four step process (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A Summary of Our Curriculum Mapping Process

Step 1: Articulate Program Goals

The key to engaging faculty in the mapping process is structuring the work so that instructors are asked to collaborate to determine the overall learning goals for a program, which we can define as the large domains of disciplinary knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes a student should have command over upon graduation. As we have worked with many faculty groups over the years, both at our institution and elsewhere, we have found it very important to pay attention to the process by which the goals and outcomes are articulated.

To generate program wide learning goals, we frequently use a procedure called Affinity Mapping (Tague, 2005), which invites equitable input from all in attendance. The procedure is structured such that no one person has greater influence or power than anyone else in the group. This democratic participation ensures that the learning goals and outcomes are derived from the ideas of the whole program and not just senior colleagues or the chair. The prompts encourage faculty to leave the current curriculum behind for the moment and consider what students will be able to do by the time they walk across the stage at graduation. Starting from the overall goals is aspirational because it lays out the faculty’s vision for what students should know and be able to do by the end of their studies.

Here is the procedure for Affinity Mapping: Appoint a facilitator from outside the program who can direct the work without participating in it. Gather together groups of 8–15 faculty members at a time, and distribute five or six Post It notes (3 × 3 or 3 × 5 are fine) to each in attendance. Then, ask participants to think about the five or six most important things students should have or be by the time they finish the program. Each participant should write one idea on each of their Post Its. The facilitator observes the group to determine when everyone has completed the task and then invites everyone to stick their Post Its randomly to a wall or white board silently. Continuing in silence, participants are invited to read all ideas and then move, arrange, and rearrange the Post Its into thematic groups, with a maximum of eight possible groups. Silence is an essential part of this process—when no one consults and the Post Its are moved without talking, no voice emerges as “louder” or more powerful than any other, and democratic participation is preserved.

Next, the facilitator invites the group to begin talking in order to title the groups with nouns or noun phrases. Typical examples might be “Communication Skills” or “Global Citizenship.” Once the groups are titled, the facilitator asks faculty pairs or trios to select a goal and describe it in one brief sentence or phrase in a language that is accessible to a lay audience. Alternately, if the program is large enough to warrant multiple faculty groups, the facilitator should collect the titles and the Post It notes associated with them from each working group. Then, after each faculty group has completed the Affinity Mapping exercise, the facilitator works with a small group of faculty—four or five people—to synthesize all the submissions into a single set of four to eight goals. The same small group also writes the descriptions for each goal. Typically, the goals generated by multiple faculty groups are surprisingly similar and easy to synthesize. An example of the finished product appears in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Sample Program Goals

Once the goals are determined, and their accompanying descriptions are written, they must be vetted with the program faculty for final suggestions and input. Smaller programs can accomplish this task by sending out the draft goals via email, asking for thoughts and input. In larger, multiprogram efforts, the divergent knowledge of diverse programs can be leveraged to ensure program goals are stated in clear, concrete terms that nonexperts can understand. When we led curriculum mapping workshops among faculty from several different disciplines at our institution, we sought to raise faculty awareness that their stated goals, while perfectly clear to specialists, could seem filled with jargon or stated vaguely to others. To accomplish this, we structured a “gallery walk” for faculty working on program wide learning goals. We asked participants from a variety of programs to write their goals on poster size sheets of paper and put them up on the wall so that all could see. Participants milled about, reading what their colleagues from other programs had done, giving them an opportunity to see and comment on others’ jargon and vagueness. Cross disciplinary comments as well as the experience of seeing others’ articulations helped faculty groups from diverse disciplines see where revision may be necessary for clarity, specificity, and straightforward language. Following the gallery walk, large programs still needed to send their learning goals around the department for feedback and to increase the buy in of their colleagues in the department.

Step 2: Articulating Student Learning Outcomes

With a program’s overarching learning goals set, the next step is to articulate student learning outcomes (SLOs). These are the specific learnings articulated in terms of what students should be able to do to demonstrate they have mastered the goal. Since all SLOs must be assessed, we ask faculty to generate no more than three or four SLOs per goal if possible. In this collaborative process, we organize the faculty into trios. We first assign two instructors to a goal to which their courses contribute. The third faculty member in the group should teach a course that does not address the goal. For example, if addressing the goal “Ethical Thought and Reasoning,” two faculty members should have experience teaching ethics in the program, while a third would teach other topics. Structuring the faculty trios in this asymmetrical manner ensures strong firsthand knowledge and experience with the goal, enabling the articulation of appropriate SLOs. Also, including someone less familiar with the goal ensures straightforward articulations of SLOs free of jargon and disciplinary assumptions.

To spur the process, we offer the common stem “Students will be able to…,” which prompts a verbal expression of the student’s learning. To assist faculty in articulating what students should be able to do to demonstrate their learning, we invite the trios to consider where students get stuck in their learning or what the best students do to reach the goal. It can be helpful at this point to provide faculty with a chart of measurable verbs organized according to Bloom’s taxonomy. These lists of verbs help faculty consider a broader range of cognitive complexity for their SLOs.

The next step is to review the SLOs, checking to make sure they are complete, clear, measurable, and neither too granular nor too broad. SLOs can be reviewed in several ways: faculty can review each other’s SLOs in cross disciplinary groups; the larger departmental faculty can provide feedback on the SLOs; or an outside educational developer can review them. A review of the SLOs should check that they are specific enough to support the goals for which they are written yet also general enough to suggest program level competencies. The language used to express SLOs is also critical. The most common occasion for revision is the use of vague verbs such as learn, know, be exposed to, or be familiar with. Although reasonable from a teacher’s perspective, these verbs are too vague to measure and are notoriously imprecise when communicating expectations to students. Returning to the list of Bloom’s taxonomy verbs can be helpful at this point.

Figure 3 provides an example of the learning outcomes that support a particular goal in a Department of Germanic Studies. In the example below, notice how the outcomes as a whole define one of the program’s learning goals, language competence.

Figure 3. Example of a Program Goal with Attendant Student Learning Outcomes

Step 3: Populating the Curriculum Map

Once the program goals and SLOs are articulated, they should be plotted against the program’s required courses in tabular fashion. Figure 4 shows an example of a truncated curriculum map to illustrate structure. In an actual map, the four to eight program learning goals would extend down column one, and required courses would extend as far as necessary across the top of the table to the right. In larger programs, one might reasonably expect hard copy dimensions on the order of 11 by 17 in. (printable on ledger paper). The appendix shows the layout and dimensions of a fully completed, though problematic, sample curriculum map. (The sample map shows some problems that many curricula might share: courses that do not address any of the program’s goals or SLOs, SLOs that are not addressed in any course in the curriculum, and examples of problematic sequencing in the N, I, and A designations. These and other issues that can occur in a completed curriculum map are described explicitly in Step 4.)

Figure 4. Required Courses Plotted Against a Program Goal and Student Learning Outcomes

After the required courses are plotted against program goals and learning outcomes, the map is completed by sending the skeletal structure to faculty who teach the courses listed in the map, asking them to indicate which of the program’s SLOs they address.

To complete the curriculum maps, faculty are invited to mark the cell(s) of the SLO(s) their course addresses. For programs just getting started or for programs where students follow a specified sequence of courses, simple Xs work fine as markers. For more advanced programs and especially for programs with a more flexible curriculum, faculty may be invited to enter the level at which they address each SLO. We recommend the letters N, I, and A to indicate the following:

Novice Level (N)—The course introduces students to important concepts and disciplinary thinking. The level is intended for students who have no previous experience with the material.

Intermediate Level (I)—The course is pitched to students who have taken at least one previous course in the discipline. It is for neither novices nor advanced learners.

Advanced Level (A)—The course is designed for students who have taken several courses in the discipline and are well familiar with the basic concepts, theories, and terminology of the discipline.

It is common for faculty to leave many cells in their course’s column blank. Typically, we would expect to see three to six cells marked. On the other hand, some faculty exuberantly claim many SLOs without realizing the implications of their actions. Here, it may be useful to pause for a discussion of what it means for a course to achieve the student learning indicated by any particular SLO. By returning to the language of an SLO, faculty can find where a course may include discussion of a topic in class—and then also see how such coverage is not sufficient for a course to indicate it addresses the SLO. However the map is populated, we remind faculty that when they indicate that their course addresses a particular SLO, they may be asked to provide an assessment for it in the future. In other words, if there is an X, or other indicators in the box, it means that the teacher should be able to produce student work by which to measure achievement of that SLO. Simply discussing or lecturing about a particular topic in class does not in and of itself warrant including it in the curriculum map. In other words, the assessment of student work is the only way to be certain that they are achieving the SLOs.

For best results, we recommend that prior to the curriculum mapping process, faculty have clearly defined course specific learning goals and outcomes so that they may align these with the broader program level learning goals and outcomes. When there are several sections of a single course taught by different faculty, we recommend that all the instructors teaching the course gather to discuss how and where their course addresses the program’s SLOs. We have found the conversations and curricular work accomplished at such meetings very productive for faculty. In one program, for example, four instructors met and realized that three of them addressed a particular SLO as a major part of the course, while one of them did not address it at all. After some good discussion, the three convinced the fourth to develop a new curriculum for his course so that all four were working toward the same outcomes (although taught in four distinct ways). The instructor was pleased that he could continue teaching his course in his own way while ensuring that all students who enrolled in the course, regardless of instructor, would emerge with the same knowledge and skills when they completed the course.

We have found that this phase of the mapping process proceeds quickly and smoothly. Once the SLOs are articulated, faculty have a good sense of which ones their course(s) addresses. Initially, a populated map will look something like Figure 5. Notice the unintentional redundancies and gaps that may arise. For example, the SLO “Analyze the values of another’s culture” is addressed at the novice and intermediate levels in Course X and addressed again at the same levels in course Y; faculty might (or might not) consider this redundant. If this map represents the order in which these courses should be taken, the SLO “Describe the values of one’s own culture” is addressed in Course W and then not again until Course Z, which might be considered too long a time gap. Course Y addressed only one SLO in this map, which might mean that it is not pulling its weight in the curriculum. These and other questions arising from a curriculum map are the focus of Step 4.

Figure 5. Truncated Curriculum Map with Indications of the Level at Which Required Courses Address SLOs. N = Novice, I = Intermediate, and A = Advanced Levels of Learning

Results of the Curriculum Mapping Process

At our institution, many programs have already benefited from using this curriculum mapping process. Below is a partial list of the programs and the results.

• A program in our School of Public Health was reaccredited by their national accrediting body, as was a program in our School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). In both instances, this type of curriculum mapping process played a critical role in their success.

• In their analysis of the curriculum map, the SPEA program realized students were entering their capstone course without adequate preparation. As a result, the program created a pre-semester workshop on targeted skills until they can address the gap in the curriculum.

• Faculty in our Media School used the curriculum mapping process to build a cutting edge degree granting program, fitting the SLOs into a developmental plan for what the students would learn from their first through their senior year. One professor claimed, “We’ve made a very rigorous program. Any student who goes through it is going to be really well prepared for the job market” (Castronova, 2016).

• A department in our School of Music shared their curriculum map with administrators, pointing out staffing needs for which they were subsequently able to hire two more faculty members.

• In a program in our business school, the mapping process revealed a program goal that was neither being taught nor assessed. The program deliberated over whether it should address the curricular gap or abandon the goal. In the end, the program created a free standing course to address the curricular gap. This important curricular development never would have happened without the detection work of the curriculum map.

• In another business program, faculty determined 10 learning goals, accompanied by 57 SLOs. In the final vetting stages, the program’s assessment subcommittee discovered that one of the goals and several SLOs were not being taught or assessed. Recognizing the problems, the assessment subcommittee synthesized and simplified the goals and SLOs, ending with seven goals and 25 SLOs for the program. Work with the curriculum map helped faculty focus on what mattered most to them in the curriculum.

• Two brand new programs at the business school, both specialized MBA programs for specific professions, leveraged the process and structure of curriculum mapping to build a systematic curriculum from the ground up.

We are being asked to facilitate the curriculum mapping process frequently as our university creates new programs or combines existing ones. We are also finding that programs that have gone through the curriculum mapping process are recommending it to their colleagues in other programs or departments.

Faculty Responses

An important part of our process was gathering feedback from faculty participants. We wanted to learn about their experience in order to assess our own efforts and to further understand their needs. After three sessions involving cohorts from 48 departments, we asked the faculty for feedback and received responses from about half to two thirds of the participants. We have identified the emergent trends and listed them below.

• Following the program goals session (Step 1), 41% of the respondents commented on the benefits of the cross disciplinary comparison, how “the outsider view clarified the insider view,” and 37% remarked on how it helped them “to get specific enough, but not too specific.”

• After the SLO articulation session (Step 2), 42% of the faculty expressed a need to better define their goals and SLOs.

• Following the population of the curriculum map (Step 3), 56% of the participants responded that their maps were completed and needed only departmental feedback to complete the process. Another 35% said their maps were still in progress with most of the data completed but that they needed to add courses or reword their SLOs.

• The departmental teams of three consistently expressed the need for more discussion and input from colleagues in their departments about the goals, SLOs, and curriculum maps.

With this feedback, we refined our process for later cohorts and adjusted our agenda to address their concerns.

Conclusions: Making the Enterprise of Higher Education Transparent

Curriculum mapping can be both demanding and challenging for anyone charged with the role of facilitating its design, implementation, and ongoing results. There are many disparate steps involved, each with its own set of critical moments, not to mention the many players who need to collaborate in order to complete the work successfully. Such challenges notwithstanding, the curriculum mapping process can be engaging, satisfying, and even transformational for the faculty and staff involved because it enables them to reflect on and articulate the goals and the major learnings the curriculum is meant to effect, which often otherwise remain tacit. Curriculum maps that are diagnostic, aspirational, and action oriented help faculty, staff, and students see the big picture of how the curriculum works as well as newly discovered strengths and shortcomings in the program’s curriculum. In a recent curriculum mapping session, for example, one faculty member was struck by how the mapping process helped her see for the first time how her course fit into the whole. She remarked,

In this article, we hope the explication of the process we use to help faculty groups create curriculum maps provides enough details for our colleagues who may wish to adapt the model to their own institutional context.

Like many other curriculum mapping methods, ours is the first step in the program review process and sets the stage for important decisions that follow. However, in our experience, we have found that the process we use encourages faculty collaboration and also reduces resistance to doing the work. We believe that the difference lies in asking faculty to first take a 30,000 ft view of what students should be able to do when they graduate. This macro perspective allows them to set content aside for the moment in order to weigh and prioritize the most important skills and knowledge they want their students to master. It is this shift that makes our method aspirational. The curriculum maps that result reify a vision for education in each program, allowing faculty to collaboratively solve problems, create new curricula, and work toward a common goal.

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Appendix: Sample Problematic Curriculum Map