Learning in Circles, Not Lines
Standard curriculum design assumes learning moves in a straight line. Module one, then module two, then module three, each building cleanly on the last.
That is not what I’ve watched happen over seventeen years.
What I’ve actually observed, again and again, is participants engaging material recursively. Someone will grasp a concept about budgeting under scarcity, move forward, and then circle back to it weeks later with an entirely different level of understanding, once their own housing situation has shifted enough to let them actually absorb it. The first pass wasn’t wasted. It just wasn’t complete, because completion depended on something outside the curriculum entirely, their own stabilizing circumstances.
If you evaluate that person against a linear model, it looks like they “failed” module one and needed to repeat it. That’s the wrong read. What actually happened is that crisis-affected learning doesn’t move in the straight line mainstream curriculum design assumes it should.
This is one of the clearest ways theory bent to match what I was actually seeing, rather than the other way around.
Have you seen someone’s learning get misjudged because it didn’t move in the straight line an evaluation framework expected?
Author: Sandra Roussel
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