Spiral Curriculum

The spiral curriculum is a curriculum design concept introduced by psychologist Jerome Bruner in his 1960 book The Process of Education, built on his claim that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to a learner at any stage of development. Rather than teaching a topic once and moving permanently on to the next, a spiral curriculum revisits the same core ideas repeatedly across a student's schooling, each time at a greater level of complexity and abstraction, so that earlier, simpler treatments of a concept lay the groundwork for later, more sophisticated ones. The approach has shaped curriculum design across many school subjects, particularly mathematics and science, where foundational ideas such as number or energy are deliberately reintroduced and deepened at successive grade levels rather than taught in a single, self-contained unit.