Lesson Plans 4 (Spirals)

This year I've been introduced to a concept in teaching that, for me (and most of the other teachers in my building), was almost entirely new. The concept, the idea, is at least as old as I am. It is called a spiral curriculum.

Let me compare a spiral curriculum to the more tradition approach to teaching that people are used to. The basic idea behind the tradition approach is that the time has come for something: fractions, gerunds, state capitals, the Third Law of Thermodynamics - whatever. Because the time has come, we're going to learn it. Maybe that means we're going to memorize it (like with state capitals). Maybe that means we're going to develop a skill with it (like the addition of fractions with like denominators). Maybe that means we're going to grasp how it affects us. But whatever it means, the time is now - for EVERYONE. We're going to work on it for a while. The kids are going to learn it NOW. And then we're going to move on to the next thing that the time has come for...

In contrast, a spiral curriculum begins with the assumption that children are not always ready to learn something. Readiness to learn is at the core of a spiral curriculum. And instead of focusing for relatively long periods of time on some narrow topic whose time has come, a spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide varies of ideas over and over ago. For a select few, the time for gerunds and infinitives has already arrived by the second grade. And for a few, algebra and geometry make perfect sense by grade three. A spiral curriculum, by moving in a circular pattern from topic to topic within field like, say, math, seeks to catch kids when they first become ready to learn something and pick up the other kids, the ones not ready to learn yet, later - the next time we spiral around to that topic.

Why isn't a spiral curriculum a circular curriculum? Because it doesn't stay at the same difficult level as time goes by....

And it is with math that I became involved in a spiral curriculum. My school district began this year implementing a curriculum developed at the University of Chicago called Everyday Math. From the very early grades students are introduced to ideas from algebra, geometry, statistics, measurement, patterns, and so on. The challenge for the teacher? Simple: stay on track. The first time you try and explain what a variable is, NO ONE gets it. You spend the day that the book says to on it and you MOVE ON.

And THAT is HARD for someone from a traditional background. Looking at a group of kids and saying, "No one understood. Some of them will get it next time..." is hard for someone from a traditional teaching background. But there will be a next time. And a next time after that. So if Billy or Suzie isn't ready for converting improper fractions to mixed numbers this week, NOW, that's okay.

Aug 16, 2008 8:46 PM

Guest :

Why is it good news for children with special needs, I'm very interested to know. How did you administor an assessment with the spiral?

Aug 16, 2008 10:14 PM

Greg Cruey :

Assessment method is not the issue. The good news for special education students is that rate of development can be accommodated. If a child doesn't understand a skill or concept this year, it will be retaught next year...

Nov 15, 2008 12:09 PM

Guest :

My concern with spiral curriculums is that students won't have mastered what they need to master for the ACT. Reteaching a concept "next year" may be too late for some special ed students who didnt' get it the first time. And for the ACT, there are few accommodations. And with AYP looking over our shoulders, how can assessments not be an issue?

Feb 12, 2009 1:36 PM

Guest :

This method of teaching is the one I have applied since 2005 in all my classes (almost). I teach a software with many many subjects in the curriculum all centered around the same general topic. I have 3 days to make my students comfortable enough to go back to their office and use it with only phone support.
All of may classes are with different levels of skills and experience in the field in which I teach, making the traditional approach even more difficult to implement. The lower skills students are quickly bored and lose their focus when a subject is exposed in it nitty gritty details. Getting them back into focus takes a lot of effort and is sometimes almost impossible.

The Spiral Curriculum is an excellent way to avoid this pitfall:
1- Students get the bird's eye view in the first run around the spiral
2- After a few runs around the spiral, some of the topics they did not grasp on the first run suddenly comes into light.
3- The brighter students, when exercise time comes (every 1-2 hours or so), ask more advanced questions during those periods. It is then appropriate to spend a few minutes one to one to give them the little push they needed to continue their advance further on the same subject without loosing the focus of the lower skilled students.

This method also has another advantage: if a class as a whole cannot cover ALL of the details of the class, then we go as far as we can and at least we have seen all of the software... maybe in less details than other classes, but at least there is not a whole sector missing, only details inside one.

Conversly, if a class is especially skilled, we can quickly go around the runs of the spiral and add more runs if we have time - and every one benefits from that approach.

The most difficult classes for the teacher become the ones where there is a wide spread of skills and experience in the same class. But isn't that difficult too with the traditionnal approach?

Apr 23, 2009 9:45 AM

Guest :

As a student who has lived through Everyday Math from the University of Chicago I have to strongly disagree. It is more frustrating than you can imagine when you don't understand and the teacher just moves on, no further explanation. We need to understand things, we need to be taught in real terms. When I went through this my classmates and I had more trouble with it than could be imagined. I was able to escape the format in 6th grade when I went to a class that used the old method, all of a sudden things made sense again. I had the worst experience with the word problems. My classification was perceptually impaired, so after reading something the first time things often do not make sense. With math it would take 2 or 3 or even 4 reads for something to even start to make sense.

While yes it is great that a special education student would not have to understand something on the first pass, just leaving it behind and picking it up months later isn't always good either.