Introducing New High Leverage Concept Progressions

Ashley Marlow and Erica Moy, ALN facilitators, introduced the High Leverage Concept Learning Progressions at the annual conference in December 2020. The HLC Learning Progressions are now up on the website. Ashley has written this blog post about the document and shared some thoughts on how this resource could be used at schools.

We are excited to share a new resource from All Learners Network! ALN uses five key components to help math educators support all students in successful mathematics. One of these key components is the High Leverage Concepts. HLCs are key mathematical understandings that students need in order to be successful in learning the math concepts at the next grade level. 

Educators who have interacted with ALN have been using HLCs to plan intervention, write IEP goals, plan Math Menu activities, and to plan formative assessments to monitor student progress. As a supplement to the HLCs, ALN has created HLC Learning Progressions for each grade level. These documents have been created as a resource for classroom teachers, math interventionists, and special educators who are creating learning opportunities for their students to achieve the concepts targeted by the HLCs. The HLC Learning Progressions identify developing stages along a continuum of concepts, models, and skills that lead toward student understanding and application of the HLC. Teachers can intentionally plan lessons based on where a student or students can be placed on the learning progression to help him or her move forward in their learning. These learning progressions are not meant to be used as a checklist.  They should be used as reference points to highlight students’ progress toward a conceptual understanding of grade-level mathematics.

We recently shared the draft version of these documents at the All Learners Network Conference. Educators from around Vermont shared their ideas on how to use these documents to support ALL means ALL:

• “This fits perfect with the idea of scope and sequence and students that work both in and out of level.”
• “This document will be useful in writing IEP goals/objectives. I can also envision using the document to help explain to parents/caregivers the expectations during the year of what skills the student should have gained by a specific time in the year.”
• I can see myself using these documents… ”with my grade level teams for planning, and for my own planning for intervention groups.”
• “The document highlights the "big ideas" for this grade band and breaks each of those down a bit.”
• "I plan to use it to help focus and structure my intervention. I'd like to work on grade-level concepts with my intervention students and I think these documents map out a way to do that in an easy to understand way.”

The Learning Progression documents are formatted to show increasing complexity from top to bottom and from left to right with the understanding that some skills and conceptual understanding does happen simultaneously. The concepts in each row are sequential and provide a progression of how students tend to develop the High Leverage Concepts at each grade level. This document is intended to be used as a means to help understand students and where they are at, and the instruction that can support students in moving along the learning progression toward understanding and applying the HLC. We hope math educators and leaders will find these documents useful in planning quality instruction for all students.

Check out the Learning Progressions!