ABSTRACT
During the 1980s, when we were both practising public school teachers, we were required to complete ‘year plans’ that were to be submitted for the principal’s approval at the beginning of each school year. Regardless of grade level or discipline, these plans were expected to obey a very specific format: three columns, the first of which listed all the school days that year, the second identified the sequence of curriculum ‘strands’ to be followed, and the third parsed those strands into specific, single-lesson topics that corresponded with the dates in the first column. The sense we made at the time was that such ‘maps’ of teaching and learning were intended to assure relatively seamless and orderly progressions through fields of knowledge for students.
