The Power of Learning Progressions

When I was a new teacher, differentiation felt impossible. I was still learning how to design a good lesson. Trying to then add in support for students at various levels, personalize elements of instruction, and create assessments that were responsive to student needs seemed like too much of a stretch. Over time, I realized that I was approaching the problem reactively, and the best approach to providing supports for students at varying levels would need to be proactive. For me, that has meant developing learning progressions.

Planning Backward from Level of Complexity

The goal of a learning progression is to identify numerous access points to the learning. Now, the very first thing I do when planning a lesson now is to identify the levels of complexity built into a standard or learning outcome and then organize that into a learning progression.

Here’s an example of what one of those learning progressions might look like, with additional resources embeded:

Beginning: I can define protagonist and antagonist as well as conflict and plot structure.

Developing: I can identify protagonists, antagonists, and conflict in a literary text.

Approaching: I can explain various methods of characterization in a literary text.

Applying: I can explain how a character connects to a major theme in a literary text.

Extending: I can explain how a character develops a theme, including analyzing how they interact with other characters and symbols to develop a complex message.

Each of those links takes students to either a teacher-created or teacher-curated resource with information and instruction for the concrete piece of learning identified in the progression.

The goal here is to demystify what goes into full proficiency of the standard or learning outcome. A learning progression looks back at the skills and knowledge a student would need to build upon to achieve proficiency with the learning outcome.

You can lean on AI to help get a draft of a learning progressions going. There is an AI tool created using Playlabs that will create a draft of a learning progression for you from any standard.

Whenever I create a learning progression, I focus on the following questions.

Phase 1 and 2: What background knowledge do I assume students are coming to me with? My goal is to identify basic background concepts and knowledge in the learning progression early on to ensure that a student who comes to me with gaps in their knowledge from previous years can identify what they need to focus on to get up to speed.

Phase 3: What new concepts will students need to learn? Standards are often complex and difficult to understand, especially for students who struggle with the content already. As such, I focus on taking those bulky standards and clearly identifying the new concepts embedded within them.

Phase 4: How will students apply this new content? This is where we start combining the content embedded in the standard with the skills also included in it.

Phase 5: How will students make connections with this content? I usually think about how this content is interconnected with other content. I try to focus on helping students take this concept they learned in isolation and help it make sense in a more complicated scenario where they need to think about a variety of things.

The learning progression serves a couple of purposes. For one, it helps me anticipate what elements might be involved in my differentiation. Two, it can be used by students like a hiker uses a map to help them course-correct when they are stuck or lost. Third, it creates a vehicle to help me package resources and supports for students as they make decisions about their learning. Finally, as a bonus, I print out these learning progressions and use them as my daily learning targets to help create more cohesion (and because I hated having to rewrite them every day).

Building feedback and assessments of learning progressions

Learning progressions shorten the feedback loop. If a student takes an assessment and misses questions related to phase 1 or gets feedback on a piece of writing that indicates they need to focus on phase 3 of the learning progression, they don’t have to wait for me to provide instruction. Instead, they can access it immediately on the learning progression via the linked resources.

Additionally, to take it to the next level, as the teacher I can embed digital assessments directly into a progression. This gives students an opportunity to engage in formative assessment at their own pace to see if they are learning and growing. 

At the beginning of a unit, we would spend time looking at the learning progressions and do some reflecting on where each of us was starting at for the progressions. This may entail a diagnostic assessment, but it could also just be some self-assessment.

Then, every time we took an assessment, we revisit the progressions to think about what the assessment was telling us. Did I move forward? Am I stuck? What do I need to focus on next? 

Building off the reflection, students then use the learning progressions and embedded resources during things like entry tasks and independent work time to access the information they need. This builds in times for me to work with individuals or pull small groups.

We repeat this process constantly throughout the unit, and then at the end, students compile evidence from the unit into a portfolio to demonstrate their understanding on each phase of the learning progression. I then use those portfolios to determine final scores for the skills, which are recorded in the grade book.

I have tried out so many things throughout my career to try to help students be more powerful learners. Some of them flopped and some went well, but if someone were to ask me the one thing about my teaching that I would never give up, my answer would be learning progressions. They completely changed how I approached student learning, gave students a better environment to take ownership over their learning, and helped make my assessment practices feel more focused on future learning as opposed to past mistakes.