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My BIG question: spiraling in asynchronous self-paced environment
This is something I’ve been wondering since I first heard about spiraling last fall. First, a little background: I teach in an alternative school where all students are working independently but until the pandemic were expected to attend school 3 hours per day (although many did not). I teach all levels of high school math and mainly use distance learning materials for academic math. Not exciting.
A couple of years ago, I revamped my trades-entry math classes and blended the grade 10 and 11 levels into a single large course. The rationale was that students would be able to progress faster if we could eliminate the review portion from the grade 11 course. It’s been quite successful with many more students completing these math courses compared to previous years. They get to take math once in high school and I have much more control over the content. I’ve included the mind map of how I organized my program.
I am very fortunate in this pandemic environment to have much more time available than usual so I’m looking for ways to make this combined course EVEN better. I wonder if spiraling might be the way to go (rather than learn it and lose it) and I would love some guidance on how to approach this.
I would also love ideas on how to bring curiosity into the course and I’m really hoping that there’s more expertise out there now that more teachers are working asynchronously.