Mapping to Essentials - Helpful Notes

Suggestions from a couple of people who went through the process;

You may find your own way through the steps in analyzing your course for the curriculum map.

In the meantime, I think Brenda’s bottoms-up idea about starting with the course assignments and linking the assignments to Domain, competency, and sub-competency is a brilliant idea. Those steps might look like:

1. Study your required student assignments (i.e. how you assess student achievement of current course objectives)

2. Separate the assignments that just test knowledge accruement – and set those aside

3. Focus on the assignments that require students to show, demonstrate, or “do” a learned action

4. Find the domain / competency / sub-competencies that link to each of the action-based assignments

5. List those sub-competencies in the map, briefly identify the “doing” assignment, list primary spheres of care, and list primary Featured Concepts

6. Use “notes” column for explaining anything or to capture good ideas for going forward

Another way to tackle this task is from top-down…starting with the big ideas / actions that currently exist in the course and work down to sub-competency level. Those steps might look like:

1. Circle or underline concepts and action verbs in current course description and objectives.

2. Find 2-3 primary domains (theory courses) or multiple domains (clinical courses) that seem most relevant to the course concepts and expected student action-based achievements in the course.

3. Review the sub-competencies in those domains that are most relevant to the course and mark them in the curriculum map.

4. Move to the next column and identify action-based assignments (ie., how you currently assess student achievement of course objectives) that show students have met the sub-competency. If you don’t have an assignment that requires students to show they have accomplished the sub-competency, then remove the sub-competency from the curriculum map. However, it would be helpful to make a note in the “Notes” section…that you teach it but do not assess it.

5. At the end of the process, do a “sweeping” review of competencies in all domains (not just the primary domains as in #2 above) – to make sure you have not missed something. If your assignments assess any of those sub-competencies, be sure to note it. Again, theory-clinical courses will speak to more domains than theory courses.