sound bites

Does anyone have a succint way to explain the difference between Teaching to Mastery and Spiraling? I am eagerly searching for clarity/brevity of speech.

(I find myself giving too much information and sounding kindof like a conspiracy theorist when I talk to people about math education these days.)


update from Catherine

I would start with this "fact sheet" I put together for a PTSA Forum a couple of years back (scroll down).

The salient passages are these:

You know, talk about curriculum, if I put in front of you a fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade textbook in math and opened up to page 200 and I jumbled them up, and said, “order them from fifth through eighth grade in order,” you'd have a very tough time because they all look the same. That's because, unfortunately, we have this national strategy of “we're not really going to teach to master, we're going to teach to exposure and over lots and lots of years of kids seeing page 200 in the math book, eventually somehow they're going to learn it. We're going to teach them how to reduce fractions in fifth grade, in sixth grade, in seventh grade, in eighth grade, in ninth grade and continue until finally somehow magically they're going to get it.” Instead of thinking, “let's teach the kids how to reduce fractions at a mastery level in fifth grade, maybe spend a little time reviewing it in sixth grade but let's move on to pre-algebra and let's move on to algebra then.” And that's been our take and so it's not that we have a different math curriculum as much as we have a different math strategy and a different math philosophy.

Interview with Mike Feinberg, Co-Founder Knowledge is Power Program

(oops - just found this sitting open on my desktop - more in a bit)