Learning progressions are an important part of understanding how learners develop skills and knowledge. They are the fundamental way that we build upon past skills to move towards more difficult and complicated ideas like building upon ones knowledge of letters to build words, words to build sentences, sentences to build paragraphs, and paragraphs to build stories and essays. How a teacher decides to teach a certain topic will depend on a variety of factors. With the example of science, a teacher may be teaching genetics to grade 10 students and look to the BC curriculum to start to decide what knowledge to focus on developing such as DNA structure and function. The teacher will have to determine if their students have knowledge of general cell types and functions and cellular reproduction to have the framework for examining how DNA is replicated. The teacher may also want to keep in mind where the material they are teaching is leading to, such as mutation and its impact on natural selection.
In most or possibly even all cases classrooms will have students that are at various points along a learning progression and will require creative methods to keep students moving forward. Some students will also require less scaffolding and will also require creative approached to keep challenging them. In both cases teachers need to be able to know and read their students to know when help or additional challenges may be required. Just as it is important to know students it is also important to know what pieces make up a learning progression as it is important to know what pieces a student may not have, and need to work on, in order to grasp the desired topic.
The idea of learning progressions can be visualized as an ever-growing tree’s trunk and branches where the trunk constitutes the most basic skills and ideas such as numbers and letters. The trunk, or knowledge of the basics, continue to widen and strengthen over time, and are also required to support branches. These branches continue to divide, but always remain connected just as knowledge of numbers leads to math which branches off to physics, which remains connected and related to math. The health of the whole tree is required to create branches, and the branches are required to grow leaves.