Learning Progressions

Norman Webb's Depths of Knowledge has begun to revolutionize the way we look at thinking.  Webb, a protege of Benjamin Bloom, created a new scale to look at the complexity of student thinking that emphasizes the act of metacognition, or thinking about your thinking.  It's very important, isn't it?  How can you make changes that improve your learning, unless you think about it?

One of the tools that helps you do this is the learning progression.  It's a collection of skills, often linear in its layout, that helps you assess where you are in learning something, and lets you see the next step so that you can make it there.

Below you'll find some great learning progressions made by some teachers at our school.

This from Kristen Greco's 1st Grade class, and helps kids work toward reading with fluency.  It puts fluent reading into clear (and memorable) steps.

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This one about opinion writing is from Matt Kimbell's 2nd Grade class.  Notice the red text shows the cumulative nature of the progression.  To be at #3, you have to have done #1 and #2.  Also, the blue and green text shows real examples of what writing like that looks like.

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This is from Erin Todd's Kindergarten class.  It describes the behaviors related to reading workshop.  The picture help make the progression easy to understand.  Students put their names on post-it's and place them where they feel their work was.  They can then look with their partner at what the next box says and make plans for the next day.

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This is a learning progression about the architecture of the minilesson that I created for teachers who want to improve in their ability to teach a focused, short minilesson in reading or writing workshop.  This works for student learning, professional learning, or any kind of learning!

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