Learning Progressions

Today, I was looking through last night’s assignments and recording its completion in my log. I’m beginning to see which students are beginning to slack off. I do keep track, but I don’t grade the homework. I spend time going over the homework in class, but I also discuss homework as a general proposition: why it needs to be done, why I need to see it, why it is assigned daily, etc.

And while they are working on a class activity, I’m walking around. And to those kids whose homework has been sporadically completed, I quietly say “Hey, I noticed that you’ve not submitted homework for the past 3 days. Is everything okay?” Most kids admit either that they did it but didn’t submit it or that they are indeed slacking off. I get to push a little bit and ask them “Why?”, or “Do you need help with the material?” or “I have some strategies for time management if you want to talk.” There’s no punishment, accusation, or negativity whatsoever. I get to be the kind and concerned advocate. I love that role! With certain students, I can tease a little, and say something about “Ugh, if you don’t start handing in your work, then I’ve got to inform your Guidance Counselor or call home to talk to your parents, and well, neither of us wants that, what a pain that would be…” All with a non-threatening, supportive, I’m-on-your-side attitude. Which is all authentic, as I am not threatening, and I am on their side. I have zero desire to involve anyone else in this conversation but the student him or herself! But if I don’t see change, I will follow up, because my job is to support their goals, and it’s a lot harder to do that after they’ve dug themselves a deep hole.

On other fronts, I’m impressed with the work most of the students are producing, as well as how easily they seem to be adapting to my approach to grading.  In my last post, I reviewed what a practice is and presented my 10 practices. I want to continue. In this post, you will learn what a Learning Progression is, how it is developed, and how it is used.

A learning progression is created when a teacher breaks down a practice into developmentally-sequenced levels of proficiency. Instead of deducting points for what students cannot do correctly, students are assessed on what they do know and can do. The teacher gives feedback based on specific language presented in a rubric.

One of my favorite things about learning progressions is that they are used all year long so that you can track growth. They are general enough to apply to categories of assessments, so students don’t need to read and interpret a new rubric for each assignment. This feature enables students, teachers, and parents to track growth over time, and students can target what they need to do to improve performance on that type of assessment.

There are 6 important features of a learning progression:

• There should be a clear pathway for the development of specific skills
• Content is the medium for learning the practices, but specific knowledge is not the focus of the learning progression
• Language must be specific for each progression. You don’t want to use generic language.
• The skills described should be general enough to apply to wide variety of assignments. Descriptors should not be specific to one assignment, or students won’t be able to practice enough to achieve mastery. Assignment-specific information goes on the assignment itself, not on the rubric.
• The language focuses on what students CAN do, not what is missing or weak. Positive language reinforces foundation building.
• The levels within the progression mirror the natural progression of skill development and/or knowledge attainment. For example, it doesn’t make sense to define a physics term until the relevant vocabulary is used within the explanation.

As discussed in the previous post, when we detailed the 10 practices, each major category of assignment is assessed with a set of Practices. Our rubric for Labs includes Experimental Design, Data Analysis, Arguing a Scientific Claim, and Using Feedback. So our rubric for a quiz/test includes Problem Solving, Creating Explanations, Creating Graphs, and Interpreting Graphs.  Projects are assessed by Engaging with Content and The Engineering Design Process.

This works GREAT! It limits our time and focuses student attention on a small handful of tasks at a time. Plus, there is inevitably some overlap between the Learning Progressions. For example, Arguing a Scientific Claim has similarities with Creating Explanations, but we use one for labs and the other for tests. Note that on Labs, we could have but don’t directly assess Creating Graphs because we know we do this on the Tests. We fold that into the Data Analysis portion of the lab reports. In this way, we hit essential skills over several different practices, without overcomplicating the assessment process.

So let’s talk about the Achievement Levels. After much deliberation, we found that 6 levels work well for students and for us. In order for students (and parents) to really see progress, we found we needed small steps. In addition, we want the rubric to have enough information to provide guidance, and still be readable and comprehensible. (For educators who would like more information about how to create the learning progressions, please see the ”Essentials of the Learning Progression Model” at www.reimaginedschools.com.)

Grant Wiggins said, and I agree, “To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy. In education, that means teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is.” In an effort to make these progressions consistent and the feedback more stable, we use anchor words associated with each developmental level of the learning progression.

• Not enough evidence means exactly that… if the student doesn’t provide enough work (or doesn’t turn in an assignment or answer a question) there simply is no way for me to provide feedback on whether or not he/she has mastered any portion of that practice. It’s another way of saying “I reserve judgment”.
• Beginning means try to respond with a clearly defined minimum.
• Developing means responding with some relevant information
• Proficient means the student explicitly uses physics in their response
• Advanced means the response is accurate
• Expert means the response is complex (sophisticated), usually tying in multiple concepts.

I like to use the analogy of a ladder for the performance levels. One must step on the previous rung before attempting to move to the next rung. Therefore, students must achieve Beginning before they move to Developing.

Notice how, unlike a real ladder, these rungs are not equally spaced out. That’s because as you move towards more complexity, there are many more items to address, and so it’s a lot more to manage. So we will move pretty quickly from Beginning to Developing, and spend a long time working on Proficient, and even longer to get to Advanced in order to solidify those skills before moving on to the next level!

Back in the post about “The Practices”, I presented all 10 practices and their goals. Here is one, Creating Explanations and Making Predictions. The goal is to show what physics you know and can apply from the current unit of study. The physics can take the form of overtly stated definitions, laws, mathematical models, equations, or relationships. So how does that translate into a learning progression?

The first thing that a student should do is try… write an explanation, any explanation that they believe will answer the question. You can’t produce a correct explanation if you don’t begin writing.  That’s Beginning. The next step is to use the applicable vocabulary that you’ve picked up during class while learning the unit content. That’s Developing. To build on that and earn Proficient, define those terms so that I can tell that you actually understand what they mean and how they apply. You can be wrong in the application, but the meaning of the terms should be correct at the proficient level.  Only after that do we look for the application to be correct, at the Advanced level.  Expert level draws in physics from other units of study.  So we try to make progress, using the skills throughout the year even as the content changes.

In order to move students gradually from one level to another, we actually block out (don’t let them view) higher levels of achievement. Before the start of the year, I identify the goals for the class, and backwards plan to set targets for each learning progression for each unit, with the goal of getting all students to some previously identified level of performance by the end of the year. Why not just show them Expert level from the beginning of the year? Research about cognitive load and executive function tells us that we need to keep the relevant learning to discrete chunks, reducing distractors and providing time to assimilate new skills before moving on to more complexity.  So we think of each level as a stepping stone, and a jumping off point for the next level. If the student is fully grounded in Beginning level skills, then they are ready to work on the Developing level skills. By keeping each step attainable, we aim to reduce student anxiety and stress.

There will be much more on Target levels later. But first I will discuss the different types of assignments in a post that will be published on 10/15.

If you explore further on this website www.reimaginedschools.com, you can find the professional development course “The Essentials of the Learning Progression Method”, in which you will learn how to create your own Learning Progressions. You can find Dave’s podcast “From Earning to Learning”, here or on your favorite podcast provider. The book “Going Gradeless: Shifting the Focus from Earning to Learning” describes the development of the Learning Progression Method from its inception, and can be found on Amazon.