Research cycles, not curricula

A curriculum is something you deliver. A research cycle is something you run.

The shapes look similar, both run on a semester clock, both have a syllabus, both end somewhere. The orientation is different.

A curriculum is fixed at the start. The syllabus is the contract. You can't change a lecture mid-term without breaking that contract; improvements wait until next year. The frame is service delivery: you are providing an education, and the students are receiving it.

A research cycle is, by definition, revisable. The students know it is a cycle. The cycle's premise is that the lab does not yet know the right shape of the work, and that figuring out the right shape is part of what the term is for. Improvements happen inside the term, not just between terms.

The lab's projects, CDL most clearly, operate in research-cycle mode. The six tools across multiple cycles have changed in every direction: an exercise gets added, the order of two tools gets swapped, an instrument's prompt gets reworded after the cohort showed an unanticipated pattern of responses. Each cycle teaches the lab what to drop, what to keep, what to add.

This changes everything about how the work is documented:

• Instructor field notes are kept on every meeting; some of them become these notes.
• Student artifacts inform the next-cycle redesign through those field notes; with a future consent infrastructure they could also become a research data substrate.
• A "this didn't work" is a design finding. The term ends with a revision list, not a debrief.

The risk: students who expected a predictable curriculum (rare but real) get something they didn't sign up for. The lab handles this by being explicit about the research-cycle frame from the first session: this is a working tool, you are participating in its development, the format may change midway. Most students lean into this once they understand it. A few don't, and that's worth noting in its own right.

Open thread. The honest version is that running teaching as research cycles is more work, not less. Every term you're rebuilding pieces. The payoff is that the tools are three generations smarter than they would be otherwise, but the trade only works if your institution lets the syllabus stay unfinished. Most don't.