Reconfiguring Bruner: Compressing the spiral curriculum 

At base, the “spiral curriculum” is the best way to design learning, but we’ve gone wrong in its implementation. 

 

It was a cloudy Tuesday, a rarity in Los Angeles, reminiscent of the “marine layer” that friends lucky enough to live near the beach complain about. The gray matched our mood. We were in the exhausted, overwhelmed, nerves-frayed-to-their-nubs time of year — the week before final exams and final grades. We all had harried looks, circles beneath our eyes and stacks of papers to grade. Essays, quizzes, and the like weighed heavily on us. We were meeting in the “penthouse,” named not for its extravagant beauty, thread count, or gravitas but because of the view. It was by far the best view in East Los Angeles. It was a meeting of the schoolwide, cross-discipline literacy cadre, and none of us wanted to be there. 

We went because we said we would and had collectively agreed to this date weeks earlier. Seated in a circle, we did a quick check-in. “I’m exhausted, but my students are working on final exhibitions,” said one, while another said, “I’m so far behind, I’m going to have to cut and mend.” 

Then we got to the woman seated beside me. She’d been teaching English for a while, had a solid reputation, was on several schoolwide committees, and was known for her passion and toughness. When it was her turn, she initially said nothing, then spoke in a low whisper but began coughing mid-sentence. By this time, everyone was watching as one tear slowly slid left then right then left toward her chin. 

“My students . . . they couldn’t do it,” she said. 

We all stared intently until she continued. “They are seniors. I assigned them an essay to write on their own, and none of them could do it. They all failed. I don’t know what to do.” 

In that moment, I realized that Bruner was wrong, and he was completely right. 

Assessing the spiral curriculum 

Jerome Bruner, a famed psychologist of education at Harvard University, is very responsible for how we conceive of education and learning today. In 1959, Bruner brought together scholars from many academic disciplines — all content experts but no professional educators — at a 10-day conference to focus on redesigning curriculum and thereby redesigning the foundation of American schools. The work took a largely discipline-based approach due to those invited and the philosophical stance of the conveners.  

Soon after the conference, Bruner intoned one of his most famous phrases and thoughts on learning: “We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (1960, p. 30). In The Process of Education (Harvard University Press, 1960), Bruner details his idea commonly referred to as the “spiral curriculum.” In short, students revisit a topic, theme, or subject several times throughout their schooling, where the complexity of the topic is increased with each visit so the new learning is connected to the old learning.  

The spiral curriculum is a profound and powerful idea, one that has been so embedded in how policy makers and educators think about curriculum and pedagogy that it’s largely second nature, unexamined, and unrecognized. Examples abound. The California State Content Standards puts 4th-grade students into their first encounter with cells — naming, knowing, and being able to identify its component parts — protons, electrons, neutrons, and the like. In 10th grade, or perhaps an accelerated 9th-grade biology class, students engage the cell again, examining it in much more of its complexity and using that information to better understand other aspects of living organisms. In mathematics, high school students study Algebra I, then Geometry, then Algebra II, etc. in a building sequence. In social studies, again looking at California State Content Standards, students study American history from American colonial times to the late 1800s in 8th grade, then pick it up again in 11th grade with an examination of 20th-century American history.  

In the Brunerian spiral, curriculum and content build upon one another, supposedly in skill growth as well as content complexity and depth. The problem is — as I realized that day in the penthouse — that the spiral doesn’t happen fast enough or with the intention needed. The assumption that teachers at least one year apart will engage the curriculum with the same intent or plan or begin where students left off is incorrect. It’s not that with a vertical strategic plan it couldn’t happen, but it would need to be a site or small learning community decision committed to extensive meeting time and professional development. 

Keeping in mind Bruner’s dictum “any content can be taught to any student,” descaffolding becomes the key. 

 This, however, is beside the point. Bruner was correct in concept but wrong in scope. The spiral curriculum works well if narrowed. Rather than aligning the curriculum to be sequentially built upon itself for the entire K-12 education of children, the curriculum should be built around the growth of intellectual and academic skills and processes and ever-increasing content complexity in each semester and year of each subject. Imagine if a history teacher stood before her students at the beginning of the year and said, “By year’s end, you will not only be able to engage very difficult and complex content, but you’ll also be able to write a five-paragraph essay in 15 minutes earning at least a B, deliver a two-page speech without notes, defend a position formally and informally under pressure, participate in discussion in multiple forms, including Socratic Seminar, teacher-directed discussion, and small-team discussion, apply information and skills/processes into wholly new contexts, and exhibit wholly original solutions to essential questions and problems in written, visual, and oral formats, including a question session from a critical audience.”  

Sequential growth 

In this way, the curriculum, assignments, and assessments systemically and sequentially grow upon one another, or spiral — but in a much more focused and intentional way. This doesn’t mean teachers don’t introduce difficult and complex content, skills, or processes in the beginning of the year. But teachers would scaffold the instruction as much as necessary for success and then descaffold it as needed. Keeping in mind Bruner’s dictum — “any content can be taught to any student” — descaffolding becomes the key. Teachers introduce important and difficult skills, processes, and content from the beginning, but they provide specific support or scaffolding to ensure student success. In each successive unit, teachers descaffold skills, processes, and content to make them more complex and difficult.  

An example from social studies will help solidify this conception. In order for skills/processes to be descaffolded, they must be attached to assignments, which are used in each successive unit. If we take delivering a speech as an example (see sidebar on Descaffolding Speech), we can see how intellectual academic skills grow. Initial success is crucial, so students can just read it. Quickly thereafter, in the succeeding units, students deliver the speech, looking at it four times, then three, then two, then they can hold the speech, then they must deliver it without the speech on hand. For it to become a learned skill, students will need to deliver a memorized speech several times. 

In order to guarantee student success, advanced planning is necessary. Similarly, timed writings are taught from the first unit, but the expectation is that there will be struggle. Knowing this and knowing that there will be one in each of the following instructional units, the teacher can offer specific support, loosening it, lessening it, and then releasing this support throughout the year. 

The first will take part of five days of instruction time (see sidebar on Timed Writing), but it will eventually be whittled down to 35 minutes on the day of the writing, 15 minutes to write a prewrite, and 20 minutes to write a “cold essay,” or one that students have not seen until they entered the classroom. Advanced planning is necessary for this; teachers will need to know how many units of instruction they’ll have in the semester and year to ensure enough growth time.  

Content similarly needs to be descaffolded. To use history as an example again, issues of race, class, power, gender, war, terrorism, in other words, difficult and complex content, should be engaged with from the beginning with the anticipation of student struggle. Scaffolding such as shorter readings, more narrow interpretations and more teacher talk can help students manage. Over time as the course proceeds, students will be able to wrestle with more complex and complicated content, wading their way through. For example, a unit on apartheid in South Africa may be scheduled last so students can truly wrestle with the question first of how to resist apartheid and then of how to heal in the aftermath of  apartheid. Both are complex and difficult questions that force students to engage deeply in a difficult and disturbing history, and while students should have engaged in an examination of race, class, and power before this, they will also need to build up to the complexities of South Africa.  

Descaffolding 

Returning to my group in the penthouse on that dreary day, descaffolding didn’t happen in my friend’s classroom or in any of our classrooms. There was no focus and no specific goal identified to be met by year’s end. If she had wanted students to be able to write an essay all on their own, she had to begin descaffolding from the beginning, slowly taking herself out of the equation so students would be ready to stand and write on their own. Instead, she had firmly entrenched herself in their writing, having students show her or others in class their thesis sentence, their outline, their first draft, second draft, etc., building a capacity of dependency on her or others for help with writing. When she took it away instantly, students were ill-prepared, and their work demonstrated this.  

Bruner was right, but his scale was wrong. His conception of spiral curriculum delivery is accurate from a broad perspective, but its implementation needs to be more compressed. It can be and is much more powerful when scaled down to fit the individual classroom or grade level. An individual teacher choosing the intellectual and academic skills that are of most value to students affords a much more potent implementation of the spiral curriculum. Reimagining Bruner’s spiral this way not only allows students and teachers to witness powerful change over time but, in fact, is much closer to Bruner’s intent that learning is connected, builds upon itself, and grows. 

Reference 

Bruner, J. (1960). Process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

 

Citation: Gibbs, B.C. (2014). Reconfiguring Bruner: Compressing the spiral curriculum. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (7), 41-44.