Curriculum Mapping for School Counselors

A curriculum map or pacing calendar or scope and sequence or whatever you prefer to call it is a comprehensive outline of both the content you are teaching and in what order. It is the visual representation of your school counseling core curriculum. 

Creating (and evaluating and updating!) your map is a hugely important part of building an effective, comprehensive school counseling program. It is essentially your guide to having a successful and impactful year with more organization and less scrambling. In this post, we will go over just HOW to do that so your curriculum map is ready to lead you to your best-prepared and most confidence-filled year yet!

Choose What to Teach

This is often the toughest and sometimes most overwhelming part of building your curriculum map. There is just SO much awesome and important stuff to cover! However, we want to intentionally choose our lessons to align with our students’ needs and, thus, maximize their impact. With a strong curriculum outline, we avoid RAGS – Random Acts of Guidance.

So, how exactly do we do this? Start by asking yourself a few questions:

How Often Are You in the Classroom?

As school counselors, there are many factors that impact how much time we spend in classrooms. Things like whether you are full-time or part-time, caseload size, other tier 1 supports at your school, other duties you are assigned, etc. Some counselors will teach weekly, monthly, quarterly, or somewhere in between! Your schedule will help you determine what is feasible for you. Because we all have different schedules, there is no “right” number of lessons.

What Are Your “Must-Have” Lessons?

These are your required lessons, the lessons you really have to include in your yearlong curriculum. This list will be vary based on your personal school counseling philosophies/preferences, your state or district requirements, administration’s goals, etc.!

Some examples might be: 

• Describing Your Referral System
• State Requirements (ex. Erin’s Law or Bullying Prevention or Career Clusters)
• School Initiatives (ex. PBIS, Restorative Practices, Zones of Regulation, Calm Corner Use, etc.)
• End of the Year Transition Lessons

You might have some must have lessons for every grade level and some for just specific grade levels.

What Units/Themes Do My Students Need?

A little reminder before we dive in here: You can’t possibly teach it all!

When we are talking about choosing units or themes, depth is more important than breadth. Meaning, we want to choose fewer topics and cover them really well. This approach to curriculum development asks you to break complex content into smaller, related parts. So instead of doing one lesson on stress management, you might have a stress management unit. This unit might be 3-4 lessons spent talking about stress which allows for deeper understanding and much more skill practice than you are able to accomplish in one lesson. Using units to organize the sequence of your curriculum map is a strategy used by many evidence-based programs like Second Step, PATHS, The Four R’s, and others. So even though it may sound counterintuitive to teach fewer topics, this structure allows for skill-building, scaffolding, and the ever important – repetition.

There are lots and lots of units to choose from. Some examples:

• Coping Skills
• Conflict Resolution
• Social Skills
• Friendship
• Decision-Making
• And many more!

When selecting what units or themes you will use, refer to the data! To help guide this decision, you can pull data from:

• Needs Assessments
• Teacher/Caregiver Referrals
• Student Self-Referrals
• Behavior
• Attendance
• Universal Screeners (if your school/district uses them)

For example, let’s say you are getting a lot of referrals from teachers in the 3rd grade about conflicts. You might reflect that in your curriculum map by including units on friendship and conflict resolution with that group.

Maybe you have caregivers that are sharing that their kinders are struggling with big feelings. It might be helpful to spend time on coping skills with them.

You could be getting an increase in your fifth graders self-referring for issues with confidence. You could include a unit on self-esteem and identity to help.  

Program goals, which are created based on the needs in your community, can also help determine what units to teach.

• If you have a goal to lessen the frequency of mediations in a class or grade level, you could create a unit focused on conflict resolution.
• If you have a goal to increase student-reported confidence levels, you might want to include a unit on self-esteem.
• If you have a goal around decreasing referrals for organization in the 5th grade, you might include executive functioning skills in your map.

The number of units you select will depend on how often you are teaching. If you are in the classroom weekly, you might be able to do 3-4. Those in the classroom monthly may only have 1-2.

Break It Down

Now that you have selected your units, you will decide which lessons you will teach within those units. This is important for us to do because no one learns something in just one lesson! Not spelling or addition or how to be a good friend. So, we need to look at our units from a bit of a birds-eye view. This helps us to see what exactly we need to teach them to effectively build these important skills. This is done for you in our K-5 Yearlong Bundle, but here are a few examples of this:

Executive Functioning

• Introduction to Executive Functioning
• Planning
• Self-Control
• Flexible Thinking

Coping Skills

• Emotional Identification
• Emotional Expression
• Coping Skill Introduction
• Coping Skill Practice

Student Skills

• Learning Habits
• Listening Skills
• Staying on Task
• Ignoring Distractions

Put It In Order

Now that you have themes and have broken them down into individual lessons, you want to decide on the sequence. Some of them won’t matter too much. If you are using Jory John books for a unit it likely doesn’t matter what order you do those in. However, some units require us to think about the order we want (or need) to present the skills in. You can think of your scope and sequence like building a structure with some skills serving as your foundation. If we skip the foundation and jump right to the roof, we are not going to have a very stable structure! Same goes for SEL instruction.

For example, if you are wanting your 1st graders to work on coping skills, you might first work on their feelings identification and feelings expression. This ensures they are able to understand what they are feeling, identify how that feeling is impacting their mind or body, express that feeling appropriately, and then they will be able to learn how to manage that feeling with coping skills.

Or, if your 4th graders could use some support with conflict resolution, you may start by defining the different types of conflict, explaining how conflict can escalate, and then discussing the options we have when we want to resolve a conflict.

When coming up with our sequence, it can also be helpful to consider important events, awareness weeks/months, etc. Some schools or counselors like to tie lessons into some of these dates to make them feel more “real” or applicable to the students. Things like:

• Statewide or School-Specific Testing Schedules
• Bullying Prevention Month (October)
• Red Ribbon Week (October 23-31, 2024)
• National School Counseling Week (February 3-7, 2025)
• Random Acts of Kindness Week (February 14-20, 2025)
• National Mental Health Awareness Month (May)

There are SO many to check out and it can feel overwhelming to try to address them all. Please don’t feel like you must! But, if you’re interested in learning about these or others, ASCA has a calendar you can explore here.

Be Flexible

You’ve spent a bunch of time and energy on your curriculum map. It feels like it’s perfect, and you’re done. But then…you start getting referrals for a problem you didn’t foresee, and you need to change it up. A major event happens locally, and you need to add time in for grief and processing. Or your universal screening data illustrates a trend you couldn’t have seen coming. That is okay!

Your curriculum map should be a living document that you adapt to your kiddos needs as they develop and change.

Consider evaluating the effectiveness by compiling pre and post-tests, checking in on behavior data, and collecting feedback from stakeholders. Be willing to make changes to help you serve your community better. Do you need to do this every month? No way. Maybe take a look at your map for potential changes each quarter, or even just at the semester break.

Classroom lessons can be so enjoyable and effective and are hopefully a part of being a school counselor that you love. Each of these positives are only made stronger when we have a curriculum map to guide us that is intentional and supported by data. Having your scope and sequence planned out helps future you feel prepared and confident whether you are in the classroom weekly, monthly, quarterly lessons or otherwise!

To do that, here is a quick review of the steps:

1. Choose What to Teach: Use data to decide what units or themes will be most impactful for your students.
2. Break It Down: Select the lessons that you will teach within each of your units.
3. Put It In Order: Sequence your lessons based on skill-development and consider important dates.
4. Be Flexible: Frequently evaluate your pacing guide and make changes as necessary.

Creating a curriculum map can feel like a big undertaking, but we are here to help!