Comments

Wow! I'm honored.

I'm a software developer and I agree with Steve that true spiralling [can be spelled either way] is a powerful technique.

If you applied it correctly to learning I think you'd do something like adding one-digit problems and then a formative assessment to see where students are having problems -- might even be handwriting -- and then, after solving the difficulties, you'd spiral back around to two-digit problems and so forth. The good idea behind spiral development is that you can't completely understand a problem or know where the difficulties like without running through it.

But it does not mean going lightly over a bunch of unrelated problems without solving any of them.

-- SusanJ - 12 Jan 2006

Susan

I'm a software developer and I agree with Steve that true spiralling [can be spelled either way] is a powerful technique.

Oh absolutely.

I don't think, offhand, that you can have serious learning without spiraling in the real sense of the term.

You always need to be connecting new knowledge, concepts, and skills to the ones you already have.....

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jan 2006

Ed says the real metaphor should be painting a room.

Constructivists think it's like putting on several coats of paint.

The first coat is thin and everything shows through; the second coat covers better; the third coat is final and the room looks right.

I think that's a far better image for what they really have in mind — except that it doesn't remotely work that way in real life.

In real life, since constructivists are doing NO formative assessment, they have no idea what the first, second, or third coats look like & whether there are huge swathes of the wall they missed.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jan 2006

Under-learned spiralling is like painting a room with a thin coat of paint that isn't washable. Then living in the room for a year, while washing the walls regularly. Then painting another coat of non-washable paint on the walls.

After a repititions, there might be a few places where the paint is thick enough to cover, but in most places it's been washed off enough that you can still see the 1930s wallpaper underneath.

-- DougSundseth - 12 Jan 2006

that isn't washable

I love it!

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jan 2006

I have a different view of spiraling. My son, who loves math, and has an instinctive feel for it, spirals instinctively, that is, he will explore a topic for a while, then move on to something else, then, after some time, days, weeks, or even months, he'll return to the same topic, and consider it from a different angle.

I have often thought that the designers of spiral curricula wish to emulate this process. If so, however, they missed a crucial point; the gifted kids who do this instinctively don't leave a topic until they understand whatever they're exploring at that time. They may not understand all aspects of fractions at once, but they DO understand whichever facet of the topic caught their attention. They also remember things very well, so, later, they can return to a topic, pick out a new facet to consider, and, when they've sucked the juice out of it, (to mix metaphors), they plunk it down in place next to the other facets they grasped earlier. They accrete layers of mastery, if you will, over time.

They emphatically do not leave a topic which they do not yet understand.

-- KtmGuest - 13 Jan 2006

My impression is that spiralling in curricula is simply a face-saving excuse for teachers to tell others and themselves when their kids fail to learn to mastery, or even to do well on the unit test.

The problem is that the Day Of Mastery never comes, with curricula like Everyday Math and Trailblazers. There is always next year.

-- CarolynJohnston - 13 Jan 2006