What is it that you think is contradictory?
All of the design advantages I've ever heard advertised for TDD come from writing a bit of test, a bit of code, a bit more test, a bit more code.
If instead you are writing a few tests and then an entire module, you're doing test-first development, but it's definitely not test-driven development as I've ever seen it presented by proponents.
You need to write a module. You write tests that tests the functionality of the module. But to pass those tests you need a couple of classes. You write tests for the classes (or at least the one you intend to work on next). The class needs some methods, you write tests for those. You write code for the methods until all methods tests pass. Hopefully the tests for the class pass, otherwise you might need to update methods and tests for those. Unt so weiter.
I don't understand how this matches to the idea of "don't write one line of code unless it's necessary to make a failing test to pass".