Spiral curriculum is a cognitive theory proposed by Jerome Bruner, based on iterative revisiting of topics at increasing levels of difficulty. Teachers design each curriculum with a specific educational purpose in mind. When students re-engage with a topic repeatedly, they both consolidate prior knowledge in their memory and build on it over time. Chris Drew (aka the Helpful Professor) is a university educator and former school teacher. Each skill/topic is addressed for only 5 to 10 min in any given day’s lesson but is revisited day after day for many lessons.”Jerome Bruner’s spiral curriculum approach highlights the importance of re-engaging with ideas over time in order to keep them fresh in our minds and consistently build on ideas. The Spiral Curriculum is predicated on cognitive theory advanced by Jerome Bruner (1960), who wrote, "We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development."
The end state of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge…” Scholars have defined Bruner’s approach in the following ways: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.A 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.This approach is extremely common in university degrees, where freshman courses provide foundational knowledge, and complexity increases from there.
All of this prepares students to think of EE design as a systems integration problem rather than simply a collection of unrelated component designs that are never put together in a larger context.[1] J. S. Bruner, The process of education. This may prevent memory loss and loss of momentum that occurs when topics are left alone entirely for period of time.“[In a strand curriculum] each lesson is organized around multiple skills or topics rather than around a single skill or topic. Spiral curriculum, a concept widely attributed to Jerome Bruner, refers to a curriculum design in which key concepts are presented repeatedly throughout the curriculum, but with deepening layers of complexity, or in different applications. What is a spiral approach to curriculum? For example, your teacher may first cover simple fractions, then more complex fractions, and then start getting you to add and subtract fractions.Rather than focusing on fractions for an entire year, your school will spread fraction classes out over a course of many years. Each 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 literacy, we’ll often use the spiral approach to increase our vocabulary, grammar, knowledge of literary topics, and critical thinking.Similarly, a student might first learn about nouns before adjectives and verbs before adverbs. Work in progress-spiral approach to curriculum to reformulate engineering curriculum.
Spiral Curriculum One way to approach the design of the curricular scope and sequence is through a spiral curriculum. Such treatment allows the earlier introduction of concepts traditionally reserved for later, more specialized courses in the curriculum, after students have mastered some fundamental principles that are often very theoretical and likely to discourage students who are eager to apply the concepts they are learning to real-world applications.Over the past several years, Detroit Mercy’s Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) program has designed and implemented such a spiral curriculum, built on a robotics theme. In their very first semester at the university, all engineering students complete a hands robotics project that introduces concepts related to mechatronics. Seek98% of students improve their grades after using Grammarly to check their papers. A comparison of spiral versus strand curriculum. It has the benefits of reinforcing information over time and using prior knowledge to inform future learning.The spiral approach to curriculum has three key principles that sum up the approach nicely. Lohani, V. K., Mallikarjunan, K., Wolfe, M. L., Wildman, T., Connor, J., Muffo, J., … & Chang, M. (2005, October). Spiral curriculum, a concept widely attributed to Jerome Bruner [1], refers to a curriculum design in which key concepts are presented repeatedly throughout the curriculum, but with deepening layers of complexity, or in different applications.
A topic will be covered intensely for a short amount of time then dropped only to be picked up again at a later date.An alternative, the ‘strand’ curriculum, aims to integrate multiple topics into every lesson, every day, in order to slowly but consistently work on topics of a long period of time. The Spiral Approach: implications for online learning. While it is widely accepted as an appropriate approach for long-term school curriculum design, its limitations include the risk that the curriculum becomes too rigid and crowded, and that educators will have to focus on re-teaching content that wasn’t taught well enough (or was forgotten) the last time the topic was taught.Harden, R., and Stamper, N. (1999). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Snider, V. E. (2004). Bruner’s spiral curriculum is an approach to education that involves regularly re-visiting the same educational topics over the course of a student’s education. In other words, it shows how learning is a never-ending lifelong process. The three principles are:“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. After Fund I, the students begin to experience tight integration across courses.