Reply To: Spiraling the curriculum – Where to begin??

[Sara Austin]

I am sold on spiralling.  I work with individual students one-to-one and so if they are away, we don’t progress. No more running out of time without even getting to a particular topic!!

I started from scratch with Grade 10 Applied Mathematics (Ontario)

I wrote post-its with the expectations from the curriculum summarized on them.

Then I sorted them by where I thought they should go in terms of which were more basic and which were more advanced. I sorted them into four streams. The final stream was the “nice if they can do this but if they can’t they are still okay to move on to the next level”.

Then I arranged within each stream an order that seemed to make sense to me.

I had to rearrange some into later streams or move things between as I built the course

A few tweaks to make sure it made sense and that each spiral was reasonably similar in size.

Then I created a schedule with these in it, and staggered the assessments to a week or so after the content was learned, to check for retention. We call these “retention checks”, not tets.