#Spiral review meaning how to
#Spiral review meaning full

In literacy, we’ll often use the spiral approach to increase our vocabulary, grammar, knowledge of literary topics, and critical thinking. Rather than focusing on fractions for an entire year, your school will spread fraction classes out over a course of many years.Įach time you return to fractions, your teacher will assess how well you retained previous information, and then help you build upon that prior knowledge. In mathematics, we often return to the same content over and over again but add complexity each time.įor example, your teacher may first cover simple fractions, then more complex fractions, and then start getting you to add and subtract fractions. By the end, a student may need to create a capstone project or dissertation that demonstrates the highest form of learning: creating something new. This approach is extremely common in university degrees, where freshman courses provide foundational knowledge, and complexity increases from there. In the final iteration, the students may need to ‘create’ something from scratch.

At the next iteration, students may need to ‘critique’ or ‘analyze’. In the first course, a student might only need to demonstrate ‘understanding’ of the topic. This approach forces us to work with our colleagues who were a child’s teacher in a previous year or in years to come to develop a cohesive approach to teaching.Ī group of educators can, for example, use a tool such as Bloom’s Taxonomy to come up with learning outcomes at different stages of a course.Įducators would develop learning outcomes that have increasing levels of complexity. Each course or unit of work that we cover builds upon something previously.

The spiral approach to curriculum design reminds us that courses are not singular, set-in-stone units of work.

Start off where the previous unit ended.

To design a curriculum using a spiral approach, you need to create units of work that:

#Spiral review meaning how to

How to Design a Curriculum using the Spiral Approach 1) defines it this way: “ fundamental ideas, once identified, should be constantly revisited and reexamined so that understanding deepens over time”

#Spiral review meaning full

1) provide this explanation: “Bruner advocates that a curriculum as it develops should revisit the basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them” 141) state that it involves “an iterative revisiting of topics, subjects or themes throughout the course.” Scholars have defined Bruner’s approach in the following ways:

The end state of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge…” (Bruner, 1960, p. “I was struck by the fact that successful efforts to teach highly structured bodies of knowledge like mathematics, physical sciences, and even the field of history often took the form of a metamorphic spiral in which at some simple level a set of ideas or operations were introduced in a rather intuitive way and, once mastered in that spirit, were then revisited and reconstrued in a more formal or operational way, then being connected with other knowledge, the mastery at this stage then being carried one step higher to a new level of formal or operational rigour and to a broader level of abstraction and comprehensiveness. Here’s Bruner’s observation in his own words: However, Bruner documented the approach and its great value for curriculum designers and, ultimately, student learning. The spiral curriculum teaching strategy was developed by cognitive theorist Jerome Bruner in 1960.īruner reflected on the fact that many teachers implicitly use this method. Prior Knowledge: A student’s prior knowledge should be utilized when a topic is returned to so that they build from their foundations rather than starting anew.Increasing Depth: Each time a student returns to the topic it should be learned at a deeper level and explore more complexity.Cyclical: Students should return to the same topic several times throughout their school career.The spiral approach to curriculum has three key principles that sum up the approach nicely. 3 Key Principles of the Spiral Curriculum When students re-engage with a topic repeatedly, they both consolidate prior knowledge in their memory and build on it over time. It is juxtaposed to methods that involve learning something then moving on, perhaps never to engage with it again. The spiral curriculum is defined as a curriculum that returns to the same topics over time. References What is the Spiral Curriculum?