Spiral progression

Teacher I, Estefania Montemayor National High School, Dumarao, Capiz

TO REMEMBER something, you must encounter it again and again. It is about familiarity, and how frequently something is mentioned can help. But to have a deeper understanding of something, you must encounter the same thing again and again but you should know something new about it.

The learning of a lesson, subject or concept in a spiral progression happens through teaching and making the students understand something is done in periodic intervals instead of memorizing things. Spiral progression is about taking things step by step, taking things slow, and gradual increasing of knowledge. The concept gets reinforced with other information over time. The higher grade level the students reach, the more complex the knowledge gets just like how things get more complex after you pass through each level of a game.

It is apt to say that it is like an upward spiral. Spiral progression allows elementary pupils or high school students can learn about things at higher year levels at an earlier time. There is no need for elementary pupils to wait for high school and for high school students to wait for college to learn some things that are supposed to be beyond their reach if the past curriculum is still being implemented today.

Spiral progression is used to learn things based on their cognitive stage. In other words, it is about teaching something in a way that pupils or students can comprehend with respect to how well they can understand things. Details are added gradually later. There is nothing to worry about when it comes to

adding so much details at the earlier grade or year levels except whether or not the introduction of the concepts or addition of the concepts can happen too fast or too slow.

With high school students learning about a little or some background information about what they are supposed to learn in high school or college, there is no need for too much review time on old concepts to give the background information for the more complex version of things. There is less redundancy. Can you understand something new if you do not know a lot about the background information of something? You can but you might find a hard time coping. That is where spiral progression can make things better.

Spiral progression requires a wide range of expertise from the teacher because concepts can be linked to lessons that are to be discussed in greater detail on other subjects and/or other year levels. In spiral progression, there is some kind of repetition that leads to progression, which is supposed to be coherent. It is a mix of familiarity and variety. It is adding specifics to the general concept. It is making the old new again. This article was even patterned based on spiral progression. I gradually introduced one information after the other and added new information in each new paragraph – just like how teachers introduce one concept then add other information later on as the pupils or students advance to another year level, which is represented in this article by the paragraphs. This is how spiral progression in education works. (