Curriculum Mapping with Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams

Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickey Rey Williams are the authors of the book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculum, published by Routledge in late 2023. Jennifer is the associate director for assessment at the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (or UMBC), and Vickie is a senior lecturer in education at UMBC.

In their book and in our conversation, they share the ways that a curriculum map can take the learning design principles we often use at the course level and apply them to the design of an entire program. The goal is to make the program more learner-centered by mapping learning outcomes against both curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities. That, in turn, can help convince all kinds of stakeholders, from students to parents to politicians, of the value colleges and universities place on teaching and learning.

Episode Resources

A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculumby Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams, https://amzn.to/44SdZhC 

Faculty Development Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County, https://calt.umbc.edu/ 

Transparent Teaching with Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Intentional Teaching Ep. 5, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/11997464-transparent-teaching-with-mary-ann-winkelmes 

“American Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges?” by Beth McMurtrie, https://www.chronicle.com/article/americans-value-good-teaching-do-colleges?sra=true 

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Chapters

• 2:09 Meet the Educators
• 8:00 What Is Curriculum Mapping?
• 15:35 Co-Curricular Learning in Maps
• 20:30 Curriculum Mapping Process
• 26:12 Adding Structure to Curricula
• 33:28 Showing the Value of Higher Ed
• 39:33 Outro

Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:00

... Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. I keep thinking about Beth McMurtrie's September 2023 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Americans Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges? In the article, she details the challenges facing colleges and universities that want to take teaching seriously from the lack of training in teaching for faculty. The fact that the majority of college courses are taught by contingent faculty and the problems institutions have in evaluating teaching effectiveness. These are system level challenges that need system level solutions, which is why I am excited to have two guests on today who spend their time thinking about system level solutions. Jennifer M Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams are the authors of the book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping Creating a Collaborative Transformative and Learner Centered Curriculum, published in late 2023 by Routledge. Jennifer is the Associate director for Assessment at the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, known as UMBC, and Vickie is a senior lecturer in education at UMBC. In their book and in our conversation, they share the ways that a curriculum map can take the learning design principles we often use at the course level and apply them to the design of an entire program. The goal is to make the program more learner centered by mapping learning outcomes against both curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities. That, in turn can help convince all kinds of stakeholders, from students to parents to maybe even politicians of the true value colleges and universities place on teaching and learning. Before we jump into the interview, I wanted to ask if you knew about my weekly intentional teaching newsletter that I write. It's a great way to stay current with the podcast and to find out what I'm reading and what I'm writing and thinking about. See the show notes for a link to sign up for the newsletter. Now onto the interview with Jennifer Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams. Jennifer, Vickie, thank you so much for being on the Intentional Teaching podcast. I'm glad to to meet you and get to know you and your work. Thanks for being here.

Jennifer Harrison: 2:18

Thank you. We really appreciate you having us, Derek.

Vickie Rey Williams: 2:21

Thank you very much.

Derek Bruff: 2:22

You're quite welcome. We'll start with my usual question, my usual opening question. Can you each tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator?

Vickie Rey Williams: 2:34

I probably was born a teacher, but I just didn't know it right away. I was a clinical psychologist in my twenties, and I began to realize that it's difficult to make people change. People come to therapy, but they're not always invested in changing their behaviors. And then I discovered that Biblio therapy was an excellent tool. For some reason, people didn't always listen to my voice, but they listened to the power of the written word. And after that, I became more and more interested in educating people.

Derek Bruff: 3:10

So when you say Biblio therapy, what do you mean?

Vickie Rey Williams: 3:13

Using books in literature as a therapeutic method to help folks understand themselves and gain insight?

Derek Bruff: 3:20

Okay. And so that that led you into investigating a career in education?

Vickie Rey Williams: 3:26

Correct.

Derek Bruff: 3:27

Well, that's great. What what was the first step on that on that career for you?

Vickie Rey Williams: 3:34

I already had a Ph.D. in psychology, so the next step was to get a master's degree in education.

Derek Bruff: 3:41

Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. And I gather you worked in the K-12 environment for a while before before college.

Vickie Rey Williams: 3:48

I did, yes. Okay. That's great. I've been tutoring children since I was in my teens, so I was born a teacher. I just didn't realize it.

Derek Bruff: 3:57

I love that. I love that. How about you, Jennifer?

Jennifer Harrison: 4:02

So thanks so much, Derek and Vicki, Thanks for reminding us about the common ground that really started this book for us and this work that we did together. Like Vicki, I could say that I was probably born a teacher, but I maybe knew it a little earlier. I remember being a very young child, watching my sisters go off to school and longing to be part of that process. And so I always had a very positive outlook on learning. And as I grew up and like Vicki, I was a tutor all through my my high school years and then on through college, I took on that role as a teacher. And when the literature revealed to me that that was the best way to learn, it was quite obvious to me that it was quite effective. And so teaching was, was something that I always wanted to do. So when I actually began as a college teacher teaching at Montgomery College and I taught English 101 and 102, those classic paired classes that often have a more complicated title, but they're always, say part one and part two. But the students didn't see that. And so even when I had students come with me from 101 to 102, they wouldn't make those connections. And that became very I became very strongly aware of this and I wondered how to work around it. And so I began working with those students to try to help them connect across courses. So that's a little bit of my background. And Vicki's been a great role model on this and our connections as social justice educators and first generation learners. We really wanted to center the students and make education more of a better learning experience for everyone.

Derek Bruff: 5:50

So there's a lot there to unpack. I think I'm reminded your your your comment about the part one and part two and the student stop making those connections. I'm reminded of a student who told me once this was a math class I was teaching. I forget which class, but there was some bit of prerequisite knowledge that the student was not exhibiting as I was working with them in office hours. And I said, Oh, you should have learned about that. And then I named the prerequisite course that was actually required to take that score. And I kid you not. The student said something like, Oh yeah, I, I took that course. I didn't think we had to worry about that stuff anymore. Like, like he had checked the course off. So he didn't he didn't think he needed to retain any of that information. It just didn't occur to him that there was a reason that he needed to know that information for this current course. And so.

Jennifer Harrison: 6:41

Very true. And I think as educators, it's easy to forget that students aren't making those connections. Like I assumed the students coming from one class to the next. I say, Well, have you done research before? And they say, No, No one ever taught us that. Like, Hello, we did this last semester and your project was on capital punishment because they all wanted to write about that at the time, but they couldn't they couldn't make that connection. And I think it's because they were finished with it. They checked it off, they siloed it, and Linda Nilson was really her work is really inspiring to us as we put this book together, because she writes about disciplinary amnesia. That idea that students silo the information, they separate it and they don't transfer. And we know from the research that students struggle to transfer learning from space to space anyway that when they silo your introductory math class and don't take it to the next class, especially if they're resistant math learners like is the case with writing, writing and maths trying to go together in that area of resistance.

Derek Bruff: 7:52

Right, Right. So I think that's a nice segue into talking about your new book, which is about curriculum mapping. So can you tell us what is curriculum mapping and why? Why is it important?

Jennifer Harrison: 8:07

Yeah, thanks, Derek. I appreciate that. So our book is called A Guide to Curriculum Mapping Creating a collaborative, transformative and learner centered Curriculum. And it really starts with the idea of backward design, which as a as a student centered principle, it centers the student in the classroom. So what we wanted to do was take that back, take that up to the program level, and the institutional level. So at the course level, we ask ourselves what do we want students to know and be able to do? And in student centered learning design, we create the learning experience and the actual deliverable that the students will create so they can demonstrate it. We identify what that looks like. We lay out the pathway. As another person who joined your podcast a while back talking about the TILT project said, We lift the curtain, we lift back the curtain and we are real to the students. Here's what you're going to learn to be able to do. Here's the here's the work you're going to be able to do to demonstrate it. And then we design the course, right? So we wanted to take that idea of centering the student to the program level and help faculty to do that more effectively. So that's at the heart of it. And Vickie, did you want to go ahead, and add?

Vickie Rey Williams: 9:22

One of the reasons why we love curriculum mapping is because we realize that students don't see the connection among their many different learning experiences, including co-curricular, and other courses in other disciplines. And the curriculum map lays that out in a way that makes it very evident and obvious to students. And that empowers them to take control in charge of their own learning.

Jennifer Harrison: 9:48

Great. So it's that idea of agency giving the students agency, but it also ties back to the faculty because in so many cases where I would be working with the department, a group of faculty, in many cases, Vicki would come and join me and we would work with them to think through what is your program, how is your program designed? And so many, so many faculty wouldn't necessarily know what course came before their course or what came after. What did the students bring in? What did they take away? What do you need to prepare for? So unless they're tied into a course sequence like the like the general chemistry and organic chemistry sequence at most schools and they have a clear view of it. They don't necessarily know what do they know coming in, what do they need to know, going out. And so creating that map where the entire faculty can come together and deliberate together about what we want students to know and be able to do by the time they reach their the end of their degree program and how do we get them there? What's the most effective pathway for it? And as Vicki said, that involves multiple courses, multiple co-curricular experiences, work inside and out of the classroom. All kinds of opportunities to learn and grow. And if the students are considering them all separate things. They check off of a list and they're not building that synthesize learning that we really want to see in undergraduate and graduate graduates of our institutions now.

Vickie Rey Williams: 11:22

And obviously, if the faculty are able to view the curriculum map as a as a holistic program, they're then able to convey that to the students and also portray that in the way that they teach and talk about their own content. And so it trickles down to the students where we really want to focus and center learning.

Derek Bruff: 11:45

So one question that occurs to me is that I, I remember some conversations with department leaders in years past where I tried to float an idea similar to that, and there wasn't always a lot of will to do that kind of program level work. And I'm wondering where do you see what are the kinds of departments or faculty where this curriculum mapping is, where they're kind of ready to receive these ideas and do something with it?

Jennifer Harrison: 12:21

So it's a really great question because it needs to be just in time, right? Or it needs to be a time for telling sort of where they have to be ready for that information. So in most and most cases in the faculty development center, we kind of take the approach of, well, wait to be invited, we'll float out a lot of ideas or do a lot of workshops, will even write a book about it and and try to get you engaged and interested but we'll wait to be invited. And then when we come and work with the different groups, then we get those groups to tell other people. So one of one of the two groups I worked with almost at the same time that were so very distinctly different was the our human centered computing group at UMBC and then also the Graduate English program. Right? So I was going back and forth between these two completely different ways of operating. I'm with human centered computing and before I before I even say two words, they've got a Google document up and they're brainstorming and working on their outcomes and doing an environmental scan and just basically operationalizing all the suggestions that I've done. And then the English department, we do the same very thing on a whiteboard and we do it more deliberately and slowly. But we get that idea of how this works across disciplines. But mostly what it is, faculty want to know how do we shape this program to make it the most effective for students? And in both of those programs, what they had in common was that students were coming in from multiple disciplines. They weren't necessarily coming in from computer science or information technology. They weren't necessarily coming in from undergrad English. So both programs needed foundational skills to bring everyone to the same level of learning, to bring everyone to the same seminar table, if you will. And so as we mapped those graduate programs, what we realized was in addition to that graduate level learning, we needed a level where we could connect and synthesize the prior learning from all the different places the students are bringing their knowledge, connect all that, and then move forward together. So that was a really exciting experience. They asked us to help them do it, and it's probably not something that any of us would have discovered if it hadn't been kind of a willing activity.

Vickie Rey Williams: 14:51

Another positive invitation that we received was from the Women's Center, a co-curricular program that serves many different students and majors on campus. They invited us to come in and help them to create both cognitive and affective objectives for their center and for their staff to help the students accomplish. And it was a wonderful experience because they were very much invested and they understood the importance of the connection between the co-curricular and the academic. They realized that horizontal alignment is just as important as vertical alignment.

Jennifer Harrison: 15:31

Okay.

Derek Bruff: 15:31

So I have some questions about that. Yes. So say more about that, because I think one of the things that struck me as I was reading some materials about your book was the involvement of co-curricular learning, which I haven't seen in kind of program level maps, at least in my experience in the past. What tell me more about that and why why that's so important and what that can look like in a curriculum map?

Jennifer Harrison: 15:55

Well, it probably also helped that Vicki and I were both on the Women's Center Advisory Board, and it was another area of common ground that we shared. But what what the Women's Center was the Women's Center had some academic elements to their work and they had some sort of support elements and then some connection elements and community building elements. So they had a whole range of different ways for people to connect and learn from coming together in the lounge and just talking to each other, to getting counseling from one of the social, social work advisors on campus or going to one of the programs or participating in critical social justice, which was a more an academic program. Right? So students have this opportunity to learn all kinds of things. And this is where Vicki ties in the idea of horizontal alignment. Let's just say you're teaching a class in public policy or political science or another topic area, and you want students to dig in to an area of critical social justice. You can they can go and participate in this as and align it horizontally to the program, dig in as a participant. Next year come back back as a presenter perhaps, and get this real rich life experience. And so that's what Vickie is talking about with horizontal alignment is when you recognize there's a gap in your program and surprise, you don't have anyone to teach a class to fill that gap nor do you have space in your program to fill that gap. That's when we go to things that already exist and are already doing that work on campus. Chances are good it's being done. You're with a bunch of smart people on campus. Somebody is working on this right? And so the Women's Center can bring that in. So if you're working on a first year seminar and you want to introduce students to to equity issues, you can bring in guest speakers from the Women's Center or from the center for women in Information technology and align horizontally across. So that's the co-curricular piece that we really wanted to bring in. And we also found that when we presented at various assessment conferences, people were really excited to hear about the co-curricular piece. They hadn't thought about how to thread that through the program. So students are coming to class and they're going to sports activities. Very nice. But the sports activities build connection to the university, the classes build connection to the university. There's common ground there. There's probably more than just that. But how do we bring that back into the classroom? How do we create that connection going forward so that we're all learning together. Vickie, did you want to add anything else?

Vickie Rey Williams: 18:46

In addition to sports, like many universities, UMBC offers, rich wonderful theatrical musical performances, dance performances, art shows. So there's a lot of opportunity to connect to the co-curricular. And I'm sure that many colleges have these same opportunities and would be able to make those connections as well.

Jennifer Harrison: 19:11

That's a great point, Vicki, because our music department actually has a program where the students are required as part of their effort to go and see this this chamber orchestra, to go and see this presentation. And I think Bach is the thing that's that's going on right now, all doing all the Bach sonatas. And they go to these different performances and then they they sometimes write reflections on them, connect them to the work that they're doing so that the co-curricular becomes connected to the curricular. And then students are learning more effectively.

Vickie Rey Williams: 19:46

We don't have to create or recreate.

Derek Bruff: 19:49

Right? Well, and I think for the students, they don't necessarily have the same silos that we do, right? Like if I'm an undergraduate going through my week, I'm involved in co-curricular, I'm involved in curricular work, right? It's all part of my life. I think sometimes as instructors, we we see the students through the window this little tiny window of the 3 hours a week of class time. We see our students, right? But like they have these rich, complex lives outside of that. And it can be hard to figure out like what are the things that are involved with, what are the resources and the folks on campus that you might connect with. But I think, yeah, it's it's very powerful. Let's talk a little bit about the curriculum mapping process.

Jennifer Harrison: 20:32

Sure.

Derek Bruff: 20:33

Because I feel like there is a lot of process here, Right. There's a kind of a useful finished product, but I suspect a lot of the value comes through the process. What are some of the big steps in in a curriculum mapping process as you typically go through it?

Jennifer Harrison: 20:46

Great question. Thanks so much, Derek. And yes, it's the process that's the most important part. We do want a product in terms of an actual map that we can use, but every time we're using that product, we're using it to make new changes, to make new improvements, to make new recognition. So it's an ongoing process and it's tied to the idea of continuous improvement and making our curriculum work as effectively for the students now and the students in the future. And so it's really a straightforward matrix that lays out the student learning outcomes, what we want students to know and be able to do, and then the learning opportunities, the curricular, the co-curricular learning opportunities that helps students to build that knowledge. And it's a visual diagram designed to help people to actually see how students build their learning across these learning opportunities. And so that requires a key. So we use a key for the undergraduate scale. We use one, two, three and four one being foundational knowledge, two and three being, you know, practicing and then complicating that knowledge and four being demonstrating undergraduate proficiency where the student is ready to move on to the next level. And that's where we want our students to be when they complete the degrees in most cases. Okay.

Derek Bruff: 22:12

So let me just let me jump in for a second. So since this is a podcast, let me try to kind of paint an audio picture here. So we might have a matrix. So kind of a set of rows and columns, right? And each row is a different learning outcome of some sort.

Jennifer Harrison: 22:30

Exactly.

Derek Bruff: 22:32

We might start because, because I've seen some of your examples, so you might start each column being a different course in the program, but then there may be another set of columns that are these co-curricular opportunities, right? And so then where the row in the column intersect, you're trying to identify if that course or that learning experience, something that's helping students move towards mastery of that learning objective. Right? The column is the learning experience. The row is learning objective. And then within that you might color code based on kind of where the students are expected to be in that journey. Am I am I tracking?

Jennifer Harrison: 23:07

Yes, absolutely. And when you color code it, most schools will use their their own school colors or whatever makes sense to them. But you can in our in our book we use a graded color scheme so that you can see the intensity moving up there, suggesting suggesting that at least a little bit with the idea of building foundational knowledge. So we might begin that map with the core course. So the first core course say in Vickie's Department of Education that introduces the core concepts and lays out the basic ideas or say in psychology, I think it's like 212 or something like that, where it lays out the basic idea and students begin to build those concepts. And so they get that foundational knowledge in some of the outcomes for the entire program. Maybe not all of them, but some of them. Right? And then they're moving up to that next course. And we're trying to help students to see how they transfer their knowledge from one course to the next and then continue to work on certain outcomes. Their spacing for other outcomes. So we're not going to address them in this class. But guess what? Next class in the class after that, we're coming back to them because we know that spaced practice really builds build students learning skills, but so does deliberate practice. And so when we build opportunities for deliberate practice across all of those learning opportunities, and then we also give students the chance to create useful, relevant deliverables, which we call signature assignments, that they can build a portfolio and show people what they know and are able to do. The curriculum map kind of lays all of those different pieces out and sort of lays out the journey of the student from entering those core courses to taking the theory courses to moving up to, say, doing a service learning project, to doing some of the co-curricular work and then moving towards whatever that program has for a capstone, whether it's a series of courses or a course called the Capstone, where the student actually demonstrates that they have learned and can demonstrate that they've learned, those those program learning outcomes.

Vickie Rey Williams: 25:34

And Derek, you mentioned earlier that, of course, students know that their lives are not just academics and that they're doing co-curricular activities and participating in social events, but they don't always understand how those connect to the academic outcomes and to the courses that they're taking. And so the curriculum map is a wonderful visual that allows students to see immediately how those things come together and where they intersect. As you indicated earlier in that box. And that visual is empowering to students and puts students in control of their own learning it puts them at the center.

Derek Bruff: 26:14

So I'm thinking of some programs that needed some help that I've worked with in the past. And I'm thinking of a math program where for math majors, A there's a kind of core set of skills around doing proofs.

Jennifer Harrison: 26:31

Oh, great.

Derek Bruff: 26:32

And the undergraduate major I had at Furman University, we had a designated course that most math majors took in their first or second year. That was it had some math content, but it was totally not the point of the course. The course was to introduce us to proof skills, right? And so we couldn't take upper level courses without taking this course. It was a kind of gateway to the major. I've talked to other math departments that don't have a course like that. And then you and what what happened was you would have students coming into upper level courses, some of whom had learned how to do proofs in other courses and some of them had not. And so it made teaching all the upper level courses challenging because you never knew if your if your majors had this core set of skills. It says to me that there's a need often in programs to be intentional about who your students are and kind of what trajectories they're following as they go through the entire program and possibly having more structure to a program than it might have had in the past. Right. So if, you know, if each faculty member is kind of teaching their own little specialty, but there's not a structure to the overall. But you mentioned having a capstone course, right? Like I know programs that don't have capstone courses or any any kind of experience like that. And so it sounds like the process of curriculum mapping might help programs decide we need certain kinds of structures in our programs in order to help our students move forward.

Jennifer Harrison: 27:59

Absolutely. And I think that I had the opportunity in prior work at National Labor College to develop programs from scratch that had never been delivered before. And that's awesome because you can really think it through, use backward design and put it together. But very rarely do we have this opportunity because in most cases we're entering programs already, they're already occurring and a lot of classes on the books are from faculty who had been here in the past. And so there's a rich institutional history that you have to unpack and dig into first, and then you have to start to look at what makes the most sense for the students and sort of dig through that program and figure out how to adjust and change the program. And I want to come back to your your comment about the proof class, because we did a lot of work on this at UMBC. One of the faculty members who teaches the proof class recognized well it had a high DFW rate and that's a D's F's and withdrawals and so that's a really important flag for most institutions that there may be a problem with the course. Grades don't measure learning, but they sometimes are indicators of not learning. And so we want to pay attention, right? So they had a high DFW rate and we knew that the national research on this proof class, as you said, that most students really struggle because if they haven't had an introductory course like you had at Furman, they haven't they're not ready to do the proofs and they're in some cases. So correct me if I'm wrong, a little resistant to writing things because they're math majors. This is how it was described to me by the math department that the math faculty that I worked with. So what they decided to do was create a prerequisite course. And this is a great opportunity for us to use backward design and test mapping, rubric mapping and so forth, and really get to the heart of the matter and create a course that we could measure all the different aspects of it as the teacher, as the students went through. We talk about it a little in the in the in the book. But that the main point was that the class became really effective. It became we were able to actually demonstrate through direct measure learning how effective it was for students. And then students could go on and take the second class and we could measure how effective they were in that second class, which is very important. And so it made a big change. And then the department decided to make it part of the required curriculum, and then they went to curriculum mapping. Right. And so so the most amazing thing about all the work that we did on that project and special thanks to Tory Williams, who did all of in the faculty development Center, who did all of the analysis across the multiple rubrics, multiple exams, multiple reflections, and all the thousands of pieces of data that we had on this particular class. We were actually able to do a number of key things, which included demonstrate that the students were learning, demonstrate that they've learned in the next class, and demonstrate that the course, the way the course was designed, could transfer from one teacher to another. And then finally, this is the really cool part. By measuring all the different aspects of learning, we were able to identify the most effective number of times that a particular concept needed to be gone over with the students for them to be able to learn it, retain it, and move forward with it. Wow.

Derek Bruff: 31:56

Wow.

Jennifer Harrison: 31:57

It's. Isn't that amazing as as a yes.

Derek Bruff: 32:01

Yes. Well, and also the way you know, you know, I asked you earlier about kind of which departments are ready to do curriculum mapping. And what I'm hearing there is a department had a known challenge with an important course. So they started working that problem. All right. Developed a robust solution to that problem. But then that started to spread and help them see, okay, we need to look at all the connections here. And I'm sure there's still opportunities for a faculty member to teach a special topics course that's kind of an elective within the major, and it doesn't have to kind of fit the puzzle. But there are other courses that need to fit the puzzle right and so that. Students have. This trajectory. Yeah.

Vickie Rey Williams: 32:43

Absolutely. Derek And sometimes it's very obvious that this group of students doesn't have the prerequisite knowledge and are not going to be successful, but sometimes it's very subtle and that's how a curriculum map can be so enlightening. Because if you as a group come together and determine in this program where is the place where they need to have this set of prerequisite skills, then you know where you need to build something. And prior to that, perhaps it's an assessment, perhaps it's an elective course, perhaps it's a course that the math department makes you take because they've figured out that you haven't had it before.

Derek Bruff: 33:24

So I've got one more question for you. And this is so here here's my question, and it's kind of a big picture question, but there have been a lot of questions lately, I feel, about the value of higher education students, parents, politicians questioning, you know, is this worth our time? Is it worth our money? Other are there other kind of paths for students to pursue? How might curriculum mapping, when done well, help provide some better answers to those questions about the value of higher ed?

Jennifer Harrison: 34:04

We want to be able to demonstrate to multiple audiences that learning what learning goes on in higher education and curriculum mapping gives you that opportunity to demonstrate this. It gives you that opportunity to show the prospective student, their parents and the many, many other audiences in higher education how this is going to work. So just imagine you are a prospective student. You come to the website for the program of your dreams. It must be a math program somewhere, the program of your dreams, and you find a video and it's the faculty walking you through, literally walking you through. I'm not sure we've told you much about our embodied exercises where we literally put the map on the floor and we walk through the curriculum like the students, and we literally walk you through Derek, what you're going to be doing as you go through your first year and you do the core course in the living learning community and you you join your your classmates in some other curricular, other co-curricular activities and you begin to move through the curriculum and interact with faculty from all the different areas that you're interested in and you move towards that capstone piece. So it's a guided tour that also shows you all the different ways that you can specialize that curriculum to meet your needs. Derek's your specific needs as a learner, and I think this is what we've learned. Student centered learning is for every single student, it's helping every single student, not just most of us, but all of them. So if we could get the curriculum map to live and breathe and speak to the students and say, this is your journey, this is the way that we're going to help you to build to what you want to be, Do you have dreams? Here's our program and here's how our program can help you to meet your dreams. It's not if it's not perfect for you, here's how you can shift and change it to make it suit your needs more effectively and we know from the research and this is this is the second piece that I want to bring up is everything. Curriculum mapping helps faculty and educators to implement research based evidence, evidence based pedagogies. So that so if we take what we know about learning and how the mind works and we bring it into the classroom and we use it effectively, and we create a program where faculty are working together to do this effectively over time, then we have a much better chance of helping that student to achieve their dreams. Vicki Did you want to add to that?

Vickie Rey Williams: 37:00

Derek I think you're absolutely right about higher education, needing to prove that it's worthwhile. In fact, K-through-12 educators have been using curriculum maps to show parents that a substantial body of learning is taking place when their children are in school. And I think that universities are going to have to start doing the same thing. Curriculum maps are a wonderful visual to show that the plan is already laid out and the learning is taking, and then it can be adjusted depending on what the needs are and how the needs might change over time. So I think the higher education will need to start to defend itself in that area. But I think that Jennifer and I are ahead of the game on that.

Jennifer Harrison: 37:46

And I'd add one more thing, which is that the evidence that it allows us to to bring in that we know that most decision making in higher education and education in general is made with learning analytics and big data. But what the curriculum map and the test map and the rubric map allows us to do is to actually get to the core of learning. We want students to demonstrate communication skills. We gave them opportunities to learn these communication skills, and we've given them opportunities to demonstrate them. What do those demonstrations tell us? Did we do a good did we did we actually help them to learn? If so, how can we help them to learn more? If not, how can? We help them to learn what they didn't learn and build their skills. And then also, how can we help the students to self-actualize in that journey as they move towards the goals so that they can manage that learning for themselves as they move forward? And they're not in the university anymore, but they're still learning and growing. And that's the lifelong learning mission of the university as well.

Derek Bruff: 38:56

That's great. Well, thank you both for sharing your time and your expertise here. I really appreciate it. This has been a fascinating conversation and I'm excited to get to share it with our podcast listeners. So thanks. Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

Jennifer Harrison: 39:08

Well, thank you so much. We really enjoyed it. And we hope that folks have an opportunity to listen to this and think a little bit about the ways that they create a deliberate, student centered curriculum.

Vickie Rey Williams: 39:22

Derek I was very impressed of how well you prepared and how much you knew about our book, So thank you for that.

Derek Bruff: 39:29

You're quite welcome. I try to do my homework. That was Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams, authors of the book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping Creating a collaborative, transformative and learner centered curriculum. Thanks to both of them for coming on the podcast to share their wisdom on program design. See the show notes for links to more information about the book and their work. What tools have you found useful for curriculum design, and what has motivated your department or program to launch a curriculum design process? I'd love to hear your experiences on this topic. You can click the link in the show notes to send me a text message or just email me at derek@derekbruff. org. Intentional teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the Online and Professional Education Association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me. Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website, the intentional teaching newsletter and my Patreon where you can help support the show for just a few bucks a month. If you found this or any episode of intentional teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.