---
name: curriculum-mapping
description: Use when asked to audit curriculum across multiple courses or grade levels for standards coverage, gaps, redundancy, and vertical alignment, as distinct from [[curriculum-design]], which designs one course, and [[learning-standards-alignment]], which maps one curriculum to a standards document rather than comparing across curricula.
---

# Curriculum Mapping

Curriculum mapping audits how curriculum fits together across multiple
courses, subjects, or grade levels: what's taught where, whether
prerequisite content taught in one grade is actually still there when
the next grade assumes it, and where the same content is unintentionally
duplicated or a required standard falls through the cracks between
courses. It operates above the level of a single course — that's
[[curriculum-design]] — and compares across curricula rather than
mapping one curriculum against an external standards document, which is
[[learning-standards-alignment]].

## Key components

- **Map inventory** — what's actually taught in each course or grade,
  collected from what teachers report teaching rather than only from
  what the official curriculum document says should be taught, since
  the two can diverge.
- **Vertical alignment check** — whether what a grade assumes students
  already know was actually taught, and at sufficient depth, in the
  grade before it.
- **Horizontal consistency check** — whether parallel sections of the
  same course, taught by different teachers, are covering comparable
  content, so students in different sections aren't getting
  substantially different curricula under the same course name.
- **Gap and redundancy list** — required content with no course
  currently responsible for it, and content taught more than once
  without an intentional reason (deliberate spiraling is fine;
  accidental duplication wastes instructional time).
- **Review cadence** — a recurring point at which the map gets checked
  against what's actually being taught, since curriculum drifts from
  its official description over a few years of individual teacher
  adjustments.

## Assumed vs. taught

The vertical alignment check is the part of curriculum mapping that
catches the most consequential failures, because the problem it finds
is usually invisible from inside any single course. A high school
course can be well designed on its own terms and still fail its
students if it assumes a skill the middle school curriculum was
supposed to teach but, in practice, doesn't reliably teach — the gap
shows up as students who "should" be ready for the course but aren't,
and without a map connecting the two courses, that gap gets diagnosed
as a student problem or a high-school-teaching problem rather than
what it actually is: a missing link between two curricula designed in
isolation from each other.

Finding this requires comparing what's actually taught against what's
actually assumed, not what the two curriculum documents claim in
their official descriptions — a middle school curriculum document can
list a skill as covered while, in practice, only some sections reach
it before the year ends, and a high school course can assume the
documented version rather than checking what actually happened in the
room the year before.

## Common pitfalls

- **Mapping the document, not the classroom** — auditing what curriculum
  guides say should be taught rather than what's actually being taught,
  which misses the drift between the two.
- **No vertical check** — auditing each grade's curriculum in isolation
  without checking whether one grade's assumptions match what the
  previous grade actually delivers.
- **Treating all duplication as waste** — cutting content that repeats
  across grades without checking whether it's an intentional spiral
  (revisited at increasing depth) versus accidental, unplanned repeat
  coverage.
- **One-time map, never revisited** — treating curriculum mapping as a
  single project rather than a recurring check, so the map is accurate
  the year it's built and stale within a few years of teacher-level
  adjustments.
- **No mechanism to act on findings** — identifying gaps and redundancy
  without a process for who actually revises the affected courses,
  so the map documents problems that never get fixed.

## Learn more

- [[curriculum-design]] for designing or revising the individual course
  a mapping exercise identifies as needing a fix.
- [[learning-standards-alignment]] for mapping one curriculum against
  an external standards document, rather than comparing curricula
  against each other.
- [[program-evaluation]] for assessing whether a curriculum, once
  taught, actually achieved its intended outcomes.