‘The Earlier, the Better’ and the Spiral Curriculum
The very first time I taught part of a lesson during my PGCE training, I had to “make a starter” for a lesson on astrophysics with my future year 10 class. The starter of a lesson is supposed to introduce the subject of the lesson, possibly with a nice activity that will engage the students. The topic being astrophysics and in particular the solar system, I thought of an introduction with a focus on scales. I planned to use a gym ball of 60 cm in diameter to represent the sun, and a bead of 6 mm in diameter to represent the earth, since the ratio of their diameters is the same as that of the sun and the earth. I decided to make my students calculate the scale factor between the model (gym ball & bead) and the reality (sun & Earth) and then work out the distance between the gym ball and the bead (75 meters) to model the actual distance between the sun and the Earth. But there my mentor stopped me (when he got my lesson plan), arguing it would be far too complicated for them. I was really surprised that year 10 students were not supposed to be able to do that sort of calculation.
When you start teaching, everything is difficult: planning lessons is difficult because you are not able to estimate how fast or slow students will be or where they might struggle (in general and for your students in particular); you know nothing about behaviour management; and you have no points of reference in the curriculum: what have they learned the previous years? What will they learn next year? You may remember well what you learned in key stage three (KS3) if you train as a teacher straight after three years of university. But my KS3 years took place such a long time ago that I had completely forgotten what one is capable of in these years, not to mention that it was in a different country. Needless to say that I felt completely lost in the British curriculum, and I made many embarrassing mistakes by pitching my lessons at a completely wrong level. So, I put as a target at one of my early tutor’s meeting, “understand the progression between KS3 and key stage four (KS4)”. You may expect, like I did, that some sessions at university would be dedicated to the analysis of the curriculum, how it is constructed, how it progresses through the key stages, what can be expected from students at each key stage in terms of understanding and using some concepts, etc. We did almost nothing of the kind. There were a couple of sessions where we had to look at the national curriculum and for instance compare what part of the curriculum is dedicated to the nature of science in the present KS4 curriculum vs. the future one (to start in September 2016); or count how many times some key words (like ‘force’ or ‘energy’) occur. We had also the chance during one session to look at the schemes of work for KS4 of the three different exam boards. For each group of students there were a few copies of each, and so we had to take turns to look at each version of the schemes of work, and then form our opinion after just a few minutes spent on each about the differences between them.
During one of our speciality sessions, Andrew, my tutor, incidentally mentioned that in many schools students learn the same topics every year, but in a deeper way than the year before. This type of curriculum is called a spiral curriculum. This term was coined in 1960 by Jerome Bruner, an American psychologist that I have already mentioned in previous articles (What Is the Purpose of Education and Constructivist Theories). In various web or research articles I could find, two main ideas of Bruner’s were put forward. Firstly, his postulate that anything can be taught to pupils of any age. The sentence cited from his work that relates to this statement is “(…) any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage.” Secondly, his conviction that children need “a spiral curriculum, in which ideas are presented in homologue form, returned to later with more precision and power, and further developed and expanded until, in the end, the student has a sense of mastery over at least some body of knowledge”.[1] Knowing nothing else about Bruner’s work, I first wondered, even by accepting his postulate, whether it was desirable to teach many different things at an early age. Maybe it is possible to teach some basic ideas of say quantum mechanics to an 8-year-old child, but is it useful? If one of my sons asks me about it because he hears me talk about it, I might indeed try my best to explain it to him possibly at his level, because he is in demand and seems genuinely interested — so why miss this opportunity? But I must say that when I hear how my sons re-tell what my husband or I have explained to them (be it in science, history, politics…), I am not so sure that we were always successful with our ‘simple’ explanations! Children have a representation of things around them completely different from ours, because of course they didn’t have all the experiences we had and their reasoning skills are not fully developed (see e.g. Piaget and his concept of stages of cognitive development[2]). So, it requires probably some special skills to ‘teach effectively in some intellectually honest form.’ Bruner himself actually emphasised this point, saying that one should teach a child when he or she is ready for it, defining readiness as “a function not so much of maturation (…) but rather of our intentions and our skill at translation of ideas into the languages and concepts of the age we are teaching”.[1] And, furthermore, it is one thing to answer difficult questions asked by a curious and eager child; it is something else to decide that all children will learn something complex at an early age.
I don’t know if Bruner’s work ultimately had such an influence in England in the conception of the curriculum, but the fact is that pupils learn almost everything earlier than in many other countries. Let’s take reading. In England, children start the formal learning of reading at the age of 4. They often even start before, when they attend a nursery or a pre-school, which must follow the curriculum for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). The idea pervading (it seems to me at least) all English educational institutions is namely, ‘the earlier you start, the better’. You may think it sounds sensible after all. But let’s imagine that the government decides that all babies should walk at 12 months — many of them do, so why don’t set as a target that ALL do? Parents could be prompted to buy proper walking shoes for their babies and to practice walking with them at least 15 minutes twice a day. I think many of us realise this would amount to completely ignoring how a child develops — and that you can’t force a baby to walk nor to speak if this is not yet the appropriate time in their development. Furthermore, studies have shown no correlation between the walking age and the coordination and intelligence of children at a later age[3]. Similarly, no evidence has been found that starting reading at this early age in England (in many other countries, children start reading at the age of 6 or 7) brings later benefits[4]. On the contrary, early formal schooling could even be damaging, as explain David Whitebread and Sue Bingham in an article published in the New Scientist[5].
To further illustrate this ‘the earlier, the better’ philosophy in the English education system, the table below shows the school year in which children from different countries (England, Germany, France, Italy, and the USA) learn different topics of the maths (numeracy) curriculum. While Germany, France, Italy and the USA would start some topics earlier and some other topics later compared to each other, England is consistently earlier than the other three countries.
The trend in maths is therefore the same as with reading: the curriculum generally foresees an earlier start than in many other countries.
Bruner’s second idea which greatly influenced both the American and English curricula is the concept of a spiral curriculum, in which topics are revisited, always at a greater depth, several times during one’s school career. In many English schools, however, while every topic is returned to every following year, the idea of ‘at greater depth’ has been largely forgotten. To be accurate, this high frequency ‘returning to’ and at a very similar depth is often not foreseen in the national curriculum. Or at least not explicitly — it can’t, actually, as the national curriculum (at least for KS3 and KS4) only gives an indication of the content that should be covered (in the form of a few laconic bullet points) during the whole key stage and thus doesn’t break it down per year. Nevertheless, ‘the earlier, the better’ dominates English schools’ schemes of work, and so year 7s will be exposed to almost all the content of the KS3 curriculum. And they learn almost exactly the same in year 8 again, and then in year 9, etc. In addition, some primary schools aim to be ahead of the curriculum (because ‘the earlier…’), and some parents try to have their children ahead of their peers to increase their prospect to enter a selective secondary school (because of the 11 plus exam). For that purpose, many parents hire tutors to parallel teach their children higher-level stuff. So that’s why you can hear some tutored children in year 4 claiming that they have been learning year 11 stuff with their tutor…
In all this rush, the very concept of foundations seems to have been simply forgotten, so that many students have no grasp at all of the concepts they are taught. (I will illustrate this point in a next post when I will be looking in more detail at the science curriculum.) And the idea of progression inherent to the spiral curriculum is hardly to be seen. Sue Caldwell[6] took edifying examples from textbooks to illustrate that repetition is firmly embedded in the students’ textbooks instead of a revisit of concepts at a greater depth. For instance, students were asked in year 7 to place these events on a probability scale: A newly-born baby will be a boy; You will watch TV some time tonight; A coin thrown in the air will land heads up. Three years later, in year 10, these students certainly can deal with probability with much more understanding, as is supposed to show the list of events they had to place on a probability scale: A new-born baby will be a girl; You will watch some TV this evening; You will get a head when throwing a coin. On my little scale during my PGCE, I would observe the same, endless repetition of content. I ended up teaching the same lessons to a year 8 and a year 10 classes. And not only was the content the same, but the level of understanding of the students was very similar. It is highly demotivating for all concerned, the students and the teacher.
The English curriculum is certainly very far from Bruner’s advocate of a curriculum with continuity and depth and his emphasis on the importance of giving “the child a sense of their own growth and own capacity to leap ahead in mastery”.
[1] Bruner, J. (1960). On learning mathematics, The Mathematics Teacher, 53, N8 pp 610–619
[2] J. Piaget. J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child (M. Cook, Trans.). New York, NY, US: Basic Books. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/11168-000
[3] See e.g. Jenni, O. G., Chaouch, A., Caflisch, J., & Rousson, V. (2013). Infant motor milestones: poor predictive value for outcome of healthy children, Acta Paediatrica, 102 (4): e181
[4] S. P. Suggate, S. P. (2009). School entry age and reading achievement in the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), International Journal of Educational Research, 48 (3), 151–161
[5] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029435-000-too-much-too-young-should-schooling-start-at-age-7/
[6] Caldwell, S. (2008). “It’s branded in our brains”, Mathematics Teaching Incorporating Micromath, 208, 3–5
