When the spiral loosens

By Herman M. Lagon

There is a particular kind of relief teachers know well. It comes when somebody finally says, “You do not have to do it that way anymore.”

For years, many Filipino Science and Mathematics teachers worked within spiral progression: teach a little Biology, move to Chemistry, turn to Physics, squeeze in Earth Science, then meet those subjects again the following year at supposedly greater depth. Mathematics followed the same general logic of revisiting concepts as learners advanced. The idea was respectable. Learning does grow through revisiting. The problem was what happened when a good theory met a crowded curriculum, uneven teacher preparation, limited laboratory resources, interrupted classes, and students carrying unfinished learning from one grade to the next.

Now something important has changed. Republic Act No. 12322 removes the statutory requirement that spiral progression must be used. It does not ban the approach. Schools may still use it when it works. What changes is the compulsion. DepEd can choose approaches it considers more effective in helping learners master knowledge and skills, while the curriculum itself must undergo systematic review at least every five years.

That distinction matters. This is not the government declaring, “Spiral progression was bad.” It is government finally saying, in effect, “Perhaps one method should not be treated as the answer for everybody.”

I wrote about this in February in a column titled “The Spiral Progression That Slips.” My concern then was never that revisiting concepts is inherently wrong. In fact, good teachers have always returned to previous learning. My concern was what happens when revisiting becomes rushing: students encounter fractions this year, meet them again next year, and somehow arrive in algebra still unsure why dividing by a fraction means multiplying by its reciprocal. In Science, they may recognize velocity, mole, or photosynthesis because they have seen the words before, but recognition is not necessarily understanding.

I remember asking Fr. Ben Nebres, mathematician and then president of Ateneo de Manila University, during a Jesuit Basic Education Commission meeting in Cebu many years ago what would happen if our school did not follow the proposed spiral approach in Junior High School. His answer was almost a dare: if other schools spiral and you do not, will their graduates necessarily be better than yours? We eventually took a different route at Ateneo de Iloilo, where accreditation gave us some curricular latitude. More than a decade later, the experience left me with a lesson that has stayed with me: sometimes fidelity to learning requires enough freedom to ask whether the prescribed route is actually getting students where they need to go.

EDCOM 2 has since given national weight to concerns teachers had been expressing from classrooms. Its reports found gaps in foundational knowledge and poor retention where competencies were repeatedly taught without meaningful progression. Its final report concluded that mandated spiral progression had failed to produce the intended cumulative learning across grade levels. It also pointed to the pressure the arrangement placed on teachers who had to function as generalists, particularly in Science and Mathematics.

Anyone who has worked in a school knows what that last problem looks like. A Biology-trained teacher suddenly finds Physics on next quarter’s teaching load. A Mathematics teacher races through a competency because the quarterly examination is approaching. A Grade 8 student is expected to work with algebraic expressions even though integers remain shaky. Everyone moves because the calendar moves. The lesson is “finished.” Whether learning happened is another matter.

So yes, removing the mandate is welcome. But I hope we push the idea of flexibility further.

Why should curricular flexibility stop at choosing between spiral and non-spiral approaches? Why not give capable schools considerably more room to decide how best to reach nationally agreed learning outcomes, provided they can demonstrate that students actually reach them?

Imagine a coastal school in Concepcion or Carles teaching statistics through fish catch data, weather patterns, and household livelihoods. A school in an agricultural community could teach Biology through crops, soil, pests, and food systems familiar to its learners. An urban high school with strong laboratories and specialist teachers might organize Science into longer disciplinary blocks. A small rural school with limited faculty might find an integrated approach more realistic. A Special Science High School campus may require an altogether different pace because its learners and mission are different. Why pretend these schools inhabit identical worlds?

The evidence in the reform discussion itself points in this direction. EDCOM 2 criticized a rigid centralized framework for limiting adaptation in settings such as the Alternative Learning System and Indigenous Peoples Education. It has also noted that the Philippine Science High School curriculum deliberately scaffolds STEM knowledge differently from the standard DepEd spiral structure. If differentiated learning makes sense for individual students, some degree of thoughtful differentiation should make sense for schools as well.

Of course, autonomy can become another fashionable word that sounds wonderful until somebody asks who is accountable when things go wrong. Giving schools freedom cannot mean allowing a Grade 10 learner in one province to know substantially less Mathematics than another simply because the school “innovated.” There must remain educational non-negotiables: literacy, numeracy, scientific reasoning, communication, citizenship, digital competence, ethical formation, and the essential knowledge and skills expected at each stage of basic education. National standards should tell us what Filipino learners deserve to know and be able to do.

But perhaps we can become less obsessed with prescribing every turn they must take to get there.

That is where the new law could become more consequential than the spiral debate itself. Education Secretary Sonny Angara has said instructional changes will still need pedagogical evidence and practical consideration, including teacher training and textbook availability. DepEd is also preparing the implementing guidelines. That caution is sensible. Freedom without preparation can merely replace one problem with several smaller ones.

Real flexibility would therefore need guardrails. Schools seeking greater curricular latitude should be able to explain what they are changing, why their learners need it, what evidence supports the change, how teachers will be prepared, and how learning will be measured. If the results are poor, adjust. If they work, learn from them. Schools could become places where responsible educational innovation happens instead of places waiting for the next memorandum to tell them what innovation should look like.

There is also something deeply respectful about that arrangement. Teachers are professionals. Principals know their communities. Parents know things about their children that national curriculum writers understandably cannot. Students in Tawi-Tawi, Makati, Antique, and Mountain Province share a country, but they do not share identical lives. Equality does not always require giving everyone precisely the same educational experience. Sometimes fairness means holding onto common expectations while allowing different communities to find the wisest path toward them.

This is also why we should resist celebrating the new law as though one deleted phrase has solved Philippine education. It has not. A teacher handling too many classes will still be exhausted under a mastery curriculum. A Science laboratory without equipment will remain unequipped whether lessons are spiral or linear. A child who reaches Grade 7 unable to read fluently will not suddenly flourish because the sequencing changed. Curriculum matters enormously, but curriculum lives inside a larger ecosystem of teachers, textbooks, classrooms, leadership, assessment, nutrition, family support, and time.

Still, removing unnecessary rigidity is a meaningful beginning. For too long, educational reform has sometimes confused uniformity with quality. We prescribed the same sequence, the same structures, and often the same solutions to schools whose realities could hardly be more different. Then we wondered why implementation looked different once it reached the classroom.

Perhaps the better future is neither completely centralized nor completely free. Set the destination clearly. Protect the essentials fiercely. Measure whether children are actually learning. Then trust competent schools and teachers with more room to decide how to get there.

The spiral does not have to disappear. Where it works, keep it. Where mastery-based sequencing works better, use that. Where local context can make an abstract lesson suddenly make sense to a child, make room for it. The point was never to win an argument over curriculum design.

The point is to make sure the child learns. And maybe Philippine education will finally move forward when we stop asking every school to walk exactly the same road—and start caring more about whether every learner actually arrives.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.