Spiral Curriculum

Abstract

The concept of “spiral intelligence” was introduced by noted American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, who promoted the concept of learning as a spontaneous process that uses innate human curiosity to expand and build knowledge. The spiral curriculum is based on Bruner’s idea that education should be cumulative, with new levels of knowledge and skill adding layers of complexity to those already learned. Bruner’s work led to major revisions in curricula in the United States and abroad and is still being used in fields as diverse as education, social science, medicine, mathematics, and history.

Overview

The spiral curriculum is built on approaching education in the same way that a child erects a structure from building blocks. A foundation is laid, and then blocks are added until the structure is completed and the goal reached. The first element of the spiral curriculum is to lay the foundation, teaching basic knowledge of a subject, then continuing to build on that foundation over the course of a semester or school year. For instance, in a medical school class using the spiral curriculum, a student’s knowledge of the cardiovascular or respiratory system is built block-by-block until the student puts those skills into practice in a clinical setting. The second element is to increase the level of difficulty and complexity as knowledge is built, providing new knowledge, broadening the scope of its application, and increasing experience of applying that knowledge. The third factor is learning to connect knowledge, which involves building and understanding skills. The goal of the spiral curriculum is reached when full competence in a subject is achieved. The spiral curriculum reinforces existing knowledge and skills, allows learners to advance from simple to complex concepts, leads to greater integration of courses and departments, follows logical sequences, encourages the application of knowledge and skills, and allows for curricular flexibility.

In colonial America, early education derived from Benjamin Franklin’s notion that teachers should teach practical skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic. Franklin believed teaching English was more important than teaching Latin. He believed that helping students to develop a basic understanding was necessary for them to become better citizens. Franklin saw education as an ongoing process. By the mid-twentieth century, education had become available to the masses, but K-12 education continued to take a practical approach. Jerome Bruner turned traditional school curricula on its head with the introduction of the spiral curriculum. Bruner taught at Harvard for three decades before becoming the Watts Professor at Oxford University. After returning to the United States, he was involved with the New School for Social Research and taught at the Law School of New York University. Bruner spent his entire life gaining knowledge by “keeping the conversation going” with colleagues, students, world leaders, and others that he met along the way. He exerted a major influence on psychology, education, medicine, physiology, anthropology, and law. In In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography (1983), Bruner suggests that his thirst for learning might be traced back to the fact that he was born blind and only gained sight after cataract surgery when he was two.

When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, it sent a shockwave throughout the world. In the United States, government officials were determined that America would not fall behind in the “race for space.” A meeting that took place in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in the 1950s changed education as it then existed. Chaired by Jerome Bruner, the meeting brought together experts from the fields of education, science, mathematics, physics, biology, history, and psychology to discuss the role of educators in ensuring that the United States would continue to be competitive in the Space Age. Specifically, participants were asked to identify subjects that should be taught in American schools, determine how to teach those subjects, and explain the imperative for continued research and inquiry. The major initiatives to come out of the Woods Hole meeting was the prioritization of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and the shift in focus in higher education from teaching to research. In 1960 in The Process of Education, Bruner explained his concept of the spiral curriculum. He based his idea on the recognition that education “often took the form of a metamorphic spiral,” with educators intuitively imparting knowledge and revisiting and restructuring what others had taught.

The Process of Education was unique in that it combined the knowledge of experts in individual subjects with educational concepts to derive a method of learning based on how human beings process knowledge. Before that time, college professors had taught their own subjects, and education was seen as the province of schools of education. Professors had only limited contact with K-12 teachers. Many of those teachers had spent more time in education classes than in classes teaching them the subjects they were certified to teach. The focus for educational psychologists was on student aptitude and achievement rather than on societal and motivational factions of education (Bruner, 2009). Starting from the concept of the spiral curriculum, experts in the various fields began working with educators to write textbooks and teaching manuals, design laboratory experiments, and make films. For example, the program of study designed by the Physical Science Study Committee was used to teach the physical sciences to 25,000 high school students.

Bruner introduced the premise of the spiral curriculum by explaining that it began “with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” as long as it was put in terms that could be understood at the existing level of knowledge. For instance, a two-year-old might hold up two fingers to show that he or she is two. That child subsequently begins to understand the basic concepts of addition and subtraction by adding or taking away objects. Later, the child learns to work with fractions of numbers. The student continues to build on that mathematical knowledge, begun with that first basic understanding of counting, throughout school.

In The Process of Education, Bruner explains that the spiral curriculum can be applied to any field. In algebra, for instance, the process begins with arranging knowns and unknowns together so that students can engage in commutation, distribution, and association. From that knowledge, students learn to solve equations in other contexts, such as chemistry and statistics. When learning language, a child progresses from words to phrases to sentences to variations in sentence structure. By that process, a child learns that language is useful in all areas of life. As a student, language is used and reinforced throughout the curriculum. By graduation, a student is ready to apply knowledge and skills learned in school to the real world.

Bruner saw children not as passive subjects but as active participants in the educational process. The four key themes of the spiral curriculum introduced in The Process of Education dealt with ensuring that the role of structure was recognized as being central to teaching, recognizing the need for the spiral curriculum that taught by building on basic skills and concepts to arrive at an understanding of more complex skills and concepts, recognizing the importance of intuition in analytical thinking, and providing students with motives for learning that went beyond grades. Bruner updated his theories in 1966, with The Process of Education: Towards a Theory of Instruction, and in 1971, with The Relevance of Education.

For Jerome Bruner, one of the chief differences between humans and animals was that each generation of animals was required to begin the learning process anew while humans built on the knowledge of past generations across a wide variety of fields. Bruner believed that as infants, humans began the process of learning, and their natural need to understand the world around them meant that they continued to gather knowledge throughout their lives. For children, the process of formal education begins with preschool and kindergarten and continues until they leave school. After leaving school, humans continue to build knowledge through what they do and what they experience. In the 1960s, Bruner was involved in developing Man, a Course of Study, a program for American fifth graders. The purpose of the course was to teach children about what it meant to be human and explain how humans were different from other species. The study, which was taught to approximately 400,000 students, encompassed five core areas of the study: toolmaking, language, social organization, the long process of childhood, and the need to know why. The course was subsequently scrapped in response to charges that is was anti-religious.

Further Insights

Bruner argued that educators need to understand the process of learning before they can become effective teachers. Teacher responsibility, according to Bruner, includes encouraging the natural curiosity of students, promoting competence in particular skills, and fostering reciprocity in education. When curricula is too rigid, it restricts learning. After publishing The Process of Education, Bruner continued to finetune his ideas, coming to the conclusion that individual cultures exercise a major impact on the process of learning.

In The Culture of Education (1996), Bruner argues that there is no single path to learning. He faults the West for assuming that Western ways are superior to others, insisting that nations have something to learn from one another, just as students are capable of teaching teachers if teachers are open to learning as well as instructing. He suggests collaboration a way to use and spread knowledge, and narrative is considered a means of processing knowledge.

Bruner’s influence was greatest in the 1960s and 1970s. George Walker (2014) remembers being impressed by a speech given by Jerome Bruner at Oxford University in the 1970s about his evolving theory on multiple intelligence. Walker contends that Bruner’s speech changed his own approach to education and the learning process forever. In the speech, Bruner used the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria to explain that not all cultures learn in the same way and that intelligence is not as simple as had previously been thought. The tendency of the Yoruba was to continue contentious meetings as long as possible because people talking to one another were not fighting. As long as arguments continued, they believed there was a chance that agreement could be reached.

The popularity of the spiral curriculum declined in the 1980s. However, it was never abandoned, and it is still in use in a variety of fields in the twenty-first century. Keiichi Takaya (2008) agrees with George Walker that Bruner’s views on the influence of culture on education evolved over time. The view introduced in The Process of Education that had such an impact on George Walker (2014) focused on culture as a means of controlling education through the curriculum, deciding what and how educators taught. Takaya argues that by the 1990s Bruner’s focus had shifted to understanding the impact of culture on values, interpretations, and experiences.

Issues

In 2009, Harvard University Press reissued Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education: A Landmark in Educational Theory, arousing new interest in the spiral curriculum. On college campuses, one of the benefits has been a breaking down of territorial barriers among departments and particular courses, with professors discussing the ways in which learning overlaps. The use of the spiral curriculum in medical education was first discussed by J. J. Kaboru in 1972. He argued that it recognized the need for repetition and reinforcement of medical knowledge. Since that time, the spiral curriculum has been widely used in medical and nursing schools. For example, during their first year as medical students at the University of Dundee, Phase One of the spiral curriculum teaches students about normal behaviors, structures, and functions. During Phase Two, second- and third-year students study abnormal behaviors, structures, and functions. During Phase III, fourth- and fifth-year students apply knowledge learned in the earlier phases.

Chemistry departments had begun using the spiral curriculum in the 1980s. However, some departments discarded it, and others never tried it. In 2007, at Miami University, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was faced with an attrition rate of 30 to 50 percent in its organic chemistry course, even though it was a required course for pre-med majors. The department had used the same curriculum for four decades, selecting new textbooks but using the same structure and content. The faculty were also concerned about the fact that large numbers of students were changing their majors after dropping the class. Out of desperation, the department instituted the spiral curriculum, designing a two-semester class, with the first course laying the groundwork for more complex coursework in the second semester. In the first semester, students learned to name organic compounds, define and discuss their properties, and explore their processes. In the second semester, they learned to apply what they had learned in the first class. Using alcohol as an example, they learned the basic properties and general reactions of alcohols and carbonyls in the first semester and learned about specific reactions and synthetic strategies in the second semester. Grove, Hershberger, and Bertz (2008) report that after the spiral curriculum was adopted, by the drop-date in mid-October, only 5 of 298 students had dropped the class. While the second class was more difficult, only 20 students dropped the class.

At Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Focused Inquiry, the spiral curriculum is being used to teach Forward Inquiry, a three-course study required for all first-year students to provide them with a foundation for success as they pursue their various majors. Students learn such skills as the way to cite references properly, how to present an argument, how to convey ideas, how to improve personal communication skills, how to identify fallacies, how to use the library’s search engines, and how to use logos, ethos, and pathos to identify claims and sub-claims (Murray, 2016).

The spiral curriculum is also being used in e-learning and distance learning courses. In 2014, 5.8 million students took online courses, and 2.85 million students took only online courses (Neumann, Neumann & Lewis, 2017). After realizing that online education was characterized by low retention and completion rates and that students were taking lengthy periods to complete programs, efforts were made to make online course more cohesive and consistent. Instituting spiral curriculums allowed instructors to focus on revisiting topics and building up to complex topics, adding depth to the curriculum, stressing links between previous and new knowledge, and increasing competence levels of students. Within the online context, the concept of the spiral curriculum is being developed as an inverted pyramid, building on the foundation of a basic course, to courses of increasing depth, to capstone courses at the top of the pyramid.

Educator Brian C. Gibbs (2014) contends that Bruner had gotten it both right and wrong with the spiral curriculum. He insists that the spiral curriculum works best when narrowed by the process of scaffolding. Gibbs explains that within a social science class, a teacher might start off with the goal of teaching students to deliver a two-page speech in class without using notes. On the first day, the student reads the speech to the class, using notes. On the second day, the student may consult notes up to four times. On the third day, the student may look at notes up to three times while delivering the speech. Each day, the student becomes less dependent on notes until the sixth day when the speech is delivered holding notes but not looking at them. On the seventh day, the notes are left on the student’s desk. By the ninth day, notes are turned in as the student enters the classroom, and the student delivers the speech from memory.

Terms & Concepts

Attrition Rates: Refers to the rate at which individuals leave classes, programs, or jobs. High attrition rates are troublesome because they suggest underlying problems. In higher education, a class that repeatedly records high attrition rates could be dropped from the curriculum, or a department could have resources cut.

Curriculum: A plan for a course of study, the curriculum is mandated at the state level in K-12 education, with input from school districts. In higher education, there are general aspects of the curriculum that affect all students and department aspects that are required for obtaining specific degrees.

Organic Chemistry: The study of carbon-containing compounds, including their properties, structures, reactions, and preparation. Students in organic chemistry study the ways in which carbon-hydrogen bonds combine with other elements such as nitrogen, oxygen, and silicon.

Race for Space: Although the first studies of the possibilities of sub-orbital flight began in Germany in the 1930s, the term generally refers to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established in 1958 to oversee America’s space explorations.

Scaffolding: Within the context of education, a technique used in skill-building, denoting the need to start with a basic structure that can be built on step-by-step to achieve a desired goal.

Sputnik: The world’s first artificial satellite, which was about the size of a beach ball. It was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. While it took only 98 minutes for the satellite to orbit the earth, its implications were extensive. It launched the Space Age and led to a new emphasis on scientific and technological advancement.

Bibliography

Bruner, J. (2009). The process of education: A landmark in educational theory. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gibbs, B. C. (2014). Reconfiguring Bruner: Compressing the spiral curriculum. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(7), 41–44. Retrieved October 1, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=99541439&site=ehost-live

Grove, N. P., Hershberger, J. W., & Bertz, S. (2008). Impact of a spiral organic curriculum in student attrition and learning. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 9(2), 157–162.

Howell, A. C. (2009). Curricular pillars in the elementary general music classroom. Music Educators Journal, 95(3), 37–41.

Murray, J. W. (2016). Skills development, habits of mind, and the spiral curriculum: A dialectical approach to undergraduate general education curriculum mapping. Cogent Education, (3), 1.

Neumann, Y., Neumann, E., & Lewis, S. (2017). Determinants of self-reflective learning and its consequences in online master degree programs. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 20(1), 1–8. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=121985881&site=ehost-live

Neumann, Y., Neumann, E., & Lewis, S. (2017). The robust learning model with a spiral curriculum: Implications for the educational effectiveness of online master degree programs. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 10(2), 95–108.

Smidt, S. (2013). Introducing Bruner: A guide for practitioners and students in early years education. New York: Routledge.

Takaya, K. (2008). Jerome Bruner’s theory of education: From early Bruner to later Bruner. Interchange, 39(1), 1–19. Retrieved October 1, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=112208705&site=ehost-live

Walker, G. (2014). The significance of Jerome Bruner. International Schools Journal, 33(2), 8–23. Retrieved October 1, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=97103899&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Coelho, C. S. ., & Moles, D. R. . (2016). Student perceptions of a spiral curriculum. European Journal of Dental Education, 20(3), 161–166. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116708537&site=ehost-live

Najafi, H., Rolheiser, C., Håklev, S., & Harrison, L. (2017). Variations in pedagogical design of massive open online courses (MOOCs) across disciplines. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 5(2), 47–64. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=125399597&site=ehost-live

Singleton, K. (2018). Incorporating a spiral curriculum into L&D. TD: Talent Development, 72(2), 70–71. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=127778530&site=ehost-live