Spiralling

A new concept to me (but something I have thought about before) is the idea of Spiralling Curriculum.

It makes so much sense, but I can also understand the hesitation of teachers to use it. We have a system that has been in place forever. We have checklists to check, report cards to write, and things to do; how can we fit this Spiralling into what we have to do?

Spiralling curriculum is the idea of keeping what we learn throughout the year going all year. Not just dividing different topics and strands into units, doing it once, testing on it, and then not revisiting it again during the year.

We're doing our students a disservice by saying after Term 1 that they don't know how to do something as a 4th Grader that soon in the year. We have all year for our students to become successful, so why do we give such stringent timelines for our students to learn in? Especially when it may take some students multiple introductions to a topic to become familiar and for the "aha" moment to come to them?

Below, watch Spiraling the Curriculum to Get Sticky Learning, a TEDxKitchenerED talk by Kristin Phillips:

I think the thing that sticks with me the most, is the idea that we don't really retain information that we are not using. That exam I crammed for in University, I couldn't tell you now any of the information I needed to know that day for that exam. The stuff I have went over repeatedly over and over again over months, years, decades - I can tell you about that stuff.

So why do we expect our students to remember certain units, strategies and skills a year after they learned about before?

Need more information on Spiralling? Check out this brochure:
http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/about/why-it-works/spiral/