Spiral Curriculum

Guest Post

Here is our first guest post for the 15 Minute Forum blog! Massive diolch to Becki Bawler  for sharing her thoughts and research on curriculum design!

A Spiral Curriculum…what could that mean?

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the recent closure and repurposing of schools in Wales has left lots of teachers in a bit of a quandry! What are we doing now? What about the new curriculum? What about next year's planning? How can I teach my students when they may not even log in? There have been lots of discussions in virtual staff rooms, groups of colleagues and of course, in the wonderful and diverse world of EduTwitter!

The summer term tends to be a term when planning time increases, especially in secondary schools as we lose our Year 11 and Year 13 students usually by May half term and have some “gained time” to think about what is coming next. This year was on course to be no different, but with our minds also on the next steps in terms of the new curriculum coming at us over the horizon with ever increasing speed. This new curriculum has been a steady and measured approach, its planned roll out is equally as measured – especially for us in secondary schools where we are waiting on the big question of assessment in order to help us inform our planning. This summer we were going to be able to really look at the What Matters statements, think about how our subject curriculum, particularly at KS3, can reflect those and there has been so much discussion about linking with our feeder primary schools to plan for continuity and to support each other.

I have attended ResearchEdCymru, I have attended TeachMeets and even organised a couple myself. I am undertaking a professional doctorate and love to read and discuss research and how it could work in my school and in my classroom; so I was looking forward to getting on with this task - but a global pandemic wasn’t to know that was it! I am now sat at home, using my dining room table to work, virtually speaking to my students, drinking a panad on my own and not with my colleagues, having brief snapshots of professional dialogue over What’s App messages and wondering how I can actually keep teaching, let alone plan, with no end date in sight. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t for one minute think we should be in school and take the risk, I fully support the Ministers call to wait for the science to tell us when the time is right, but I do feel cheated in terms of my planning time. Then I read a blog post by Gareth Evans and even more so, I came to realise his is the right approach. We cannot help what has happened, and now more than ever there are calls across the UK (indeed the world) to reflect on education and schools as places of learning, qualifications, curriculum… so we do need to pause for thought. Pause, not stop.

I am an experienced middle leader and look forward to a day in the future when I can influence and support the curriculum planning of a school on an even bigger level by being part of a senior team (and ultimately, one day as a headteacher of my own school), but in the meantime I can take charge of my own faculty and my whole school responsibilities and plan for progression. What I can do right now is to continue to read the research about curriculum planning and make my own faculty reflect the best research informed practice I can. Having spent a large part of our informal PLN discussion and 15 minute forums in recent months considering Rosenshines Principles and those based on the science of learning, the Spiral Curriculum is something that returns to me time and time again.

Based on Jerome Bruners’ belief that any subject can be taught to any child at any age, the spiral curriculum includes “the student revisits a topic, theme or subject several times throughout their school career, the complexity of the topic or theme increases with each revisit and new learning has a relationship with old learning and is put in context with the old” (Johnston, H. 2012) This seems simple at first, let’s just keep re-teaching the same stuff but make it harder every time, but the reality needs more detailed planning, cross phase planning, clear understanding by all phases and of the end goals and concepts to be taught accurately at all levels. Science springs to mind as a good example. We teach the water cycle to children at all key stages, to differing degrees but if the original concepts taught in one phase are scientifically inaccurate, or rushed through then the concepts that these children will learn cannot be built on successfully, leading to misconceptions which are really hard to address as we get older. We also have to consider the end goal! Is it that students need to learn the Water Cycle as per the current GCSE exam specification, is that sufficient for them, is that the gold standard in terms of scientific accuracy, or should we aim higher – degree level scientific concepts as our ultimate aim? We don’t know at age 5 which children will need this knowledge at a higher level and which will just need to understand the concept as a basic premise, so how can we apply a spiral curriculum with these vague end goals in mind, even with something as concrete as a proven and fixed scientific concept. (Apologies to science teachers for the simplicity of this example!)

The spiral curriculum draws on the very best of cognitive science research and is often paired with other aspects such as spaced learning and retrieval practice (for lots more on these concepts I can fully recommend this site, and it often includes making links across topics and themes, building the schema of certain concepts so that a web of learning occurs. In some schools this approach is being used at GCSE level only (see this from the Chartered College’s Impact magazine for some examples) but with the new curriculum in Wales coming along, and my realisation that we do need to pause for thought at this time, how would a spiral curriculum work across subjects, between subjects and, most importantly, across schools as we negotiate progression steps.

The DCF and the LNF in Wales currently look like the beginnings of a spiral curriculum process, with increasing levels of challenge and expectation across the same key concepts. Why can’t we look deeper at the subject specific curriculums we are going to produce too? The values of a spiral curriculum have been summed up by many, Harden (1999) describes them as Reinforcement, Moving from Simple to Complex, Integration, Logical Sequences, High Level Objectives, and Flexibility. Is this what Progression Steps are aiming to become?

What could it look like? Firstly, there is a need to break down the traditional barriers in subjects, broadening the idea of topics and themes. In my opinion, subjects like English do this really well already as they draw on language concepts throughout a child’s education, deepening thinking and introducing more complex aspects based on solid foundations which often begin with mark making and phonics in pre-school. Other subjects tend to compartmentalise – The Tudors, Spreadsheets, Quadratic Equations, Volcanoes, Electricity. Yes, this is a simplistic view of what we all teach, but it is the topic that is the focus and there is a set of knowledge that links to each topic. Planning for a spiral curriculum now, could lead to more links – not a full thematic based approach with tenuous, forced links but a recognition that some existing topics naturally link together, and perhaps there is an opportunity to deliver these at similar times, or to use one as a  springboard to another.

This “downtime” (and I use this in quotation marks as I am very aware it is anything but!) could give us a chance to work together, to digitally connect with teachers from our feeder schools and think about what we teach, when we teach it and how we can build these links to begin to create this spiral effect, where pupils can revisit and extend their learning right from foundation phase to post GCSE. It doesn’t have to be solely the What Matters statements, it doesn’t have to work backwards from the existing GCSE specification, but that shared vision, using a spiral ideal, building in spaced learning, retrieval practice and a common understanding of our direction of travel would be a great starting point and good practice for what may come next. Yes, as Gareth Evans says, now it is time to pause, but that doesn’t mean stop (or not as I read it!) but we shouldn’t fix things in place right now, we shouldn’t be afraid to look at changes despite all the hours of work that have already gone into it and using the What Matters and the Progression Steps to develop a collaborative, spiral curriculum could be something that we can now do, to make us all feel a little more like the summer term we were expecting.