Spirals of teaching and learning.

In Thinking Children there's an example of spirals as a schema; certainly some people really love spirals and use them as a primary notion for exploring and interpreting the world.

When Wilton Playcentre was at work on its COI we studied ourselves studying the children, some of whom were into spirals. We studied ourselves with action research spirals: we'd do something, notice what we'd done, recognise and think about what we did, respond by working out something else to do and then do that. This is a research spiral because it's sort of circular but as we added what we thought of to what we did before the details are a bit different each time, like a spiral we didn't find ourselves exactly where we were before.

Our school's having a curriculum community meeting on Thursday. The New Zealand Curriculum tells the school to design and review our own curriculum; there was a survey recently (which my family failed to answer) and the meeting will look at some of the findings from it as the first step of consultation on the curriculum.