Learning Progressions are the steps taken in learning. For example, you can’t teach reading in kindergarten and expect them to be able to read a novel right away. There are certain steps that students must hit in order to build their proficiency towards a skill. In this reading example, students must first learn to recognize letters, and then be able to identify which sounds each letter makes. Next they need to be able to combine the letter sounds to make words, including recognizing sound patterns and irregularities. On top of learning to read words, students also need to build their reading comprehension skills and be able to understand what they’re reading. It isn’t just as simple as handing a novel to a student and telling them to read.
Learning progressions are present in every subject and every learning goal. As a teacher, you need to be able to recognize what step in each progression your students should on average be at the grade you’re teaching, and you need to be able to assess where your students are actually at. If, say, you’re trying to teach your students how to write sentences but they don’t know the difference between nouns and verbs, you have to be able to recognize that they haven’t climbed all the necessary steps to reach the one you want to teach from. Skipping steps isn’t impossible, but the students might trip and fall and scrape their knee while jumping, and then move on to the next grade not knowing a noun from a verb. As a teacher, you need to be able to reach not only the students that are at the step in the progression that you want to teach, but also those who are further down the staircase and those who are up ahead.
Learning progressions are important because they illustrate the steps necessary for a student to fully develop a skill. If a student hasn’t hit the previous steps in the learning progressions for a skill, they aren’t going to be successful with the step that you are trying to teach. In building these target skills, you have to make sure the students have the base skills they need in order to understand and learn the more complex aspects of the skillset.
In the activity in class last week, I learned that cooking was a very difficult skill to determine the learning progressions for. There are so many smaller skills—i.e. reading a recipe, knowing how to use measurement tools—that are necessary to know before you can even begin cooking, and within our group, we couldn’t agree on an order for the learning progressions to go in. This taught me that creating a sequence of learning progressions isn’t as easy as it might sound. Developing learning progressions for a skill isn’t as easy as going from A to B to C, but is more along the lines of first you must do A.1, B.1, and B.2, and then if you want to do C.1, you also need to learn D.1 to D.4 first. It’s a complex process, and learning how to properly manage a learning progressions framework and apply it to a class is a skill we all need to work on and develop to become great teachers.
