V95 N7 kappanmagazine.org 41 I t was a cloudy Tuesday, a rarity in Los Angeles, reminiscent of the “marine layer” that friends lucky enough to live near the beach complain about. The gray matched our mood. We were in the exhausted, overwhelmed, nerves-frayed-to-their-nubs time of year — the week before final exams and final grades. We all had harried looks, circles beneath our eyes and stacks of papers to grade. Essays, quizzes, and the like weighed heavily on us. We were meeting in the “penthouse,” named not for its extravagant beauty, thread count, or gravitas but because of the view. It was by far the best view in East Los Angeles. It was a meeting of the schoolwide, cross-discipline literacy cadre, and none of us wanted to be there. Reconfiguring Bruner: Compressing the spiral curriculum BRIAN C. GIBBS (briangibbs@earthlink.net) is a graduate student in curriculum and instruction in the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thinkstock/iStock Comments? Like PDK at www. facebook.com/pdkintl At base, the “spiral curriculum” is the best way to design learning, but we’ve gone wrong in its implementation. By Brian C. Gibbs Bruner’s conception of spiral curriculum delivery is accurate from a broad perspective, but its implementation needs to be more compressed.