In Education 394 we had started to delve into the ins and outs of learning progressions. Talking about this for me was very interesting because for a long time we have been hearing the term “scaffolding” not only from our instructors but many of our guest teacher speakers. In my understanding from the readings we had done on the subject as well as from our class discussion is that learning progressions are basically the step by step skills and learning goals that you can have for just one thing such as reading. In this example, you could start with letter recognition, then progress into the letter-sound association, and from there start with some simple words. The progression can go on and on. I think that learning progressions are important because you can’t necessarily expect a student to fully grasp a skill or topic without laying down the groundwork. To continue with the reading example, you would not expect a kindergarten student to start reading small books without knowing their alphabet. If we want to look at learning progressions in a very meta way the entire education system from k- 12 is one giant learning progression, but that is a very generalized way of looking at education. In other words, splitting up one big learning skill or goal into smaller more manageable sections will most likely lead to a more well-rounded understanding of that thing. From the learning activity that we had to do in groups, I did learn that once you start splitting up your skill you realize there are a lot more aspects of it than you realize at first glance. I keep referring to reading as that was the skill my group had chosen to look at but another interesting I found was that as we spaned it across grades we also realized that there are many different perspectives you could implore such as looking at different genres or types of writing such as poetry. I did personally feel that once we broke reading down every step we came up with felt very traditional but I believe that with a skill such as reading that may be the best approach to start with the structure to build that reading ability. Overall, I enjoyed this topic as it made me see that there is definitely more to the approach to a certain skill or topic than just presenting it to your students as one big giant scary thing as when you break it down you come to realize that it may become easier to grasp.