Have you ever found yourself teaching a curriculum but felt uncertain about charting progress? Or studied something without knowing whether you had met the stated objectives? Imagine you’re halfway through the term. You’ve delivered every lesson on the plan. And yet… you can’t say for sure if learners are truly on track. The curriculum says one thing, the classroom reality says another. This is where progression pathways succeed—or fail.
This sounds like an issue with the progression pathway. Read on for why these pathways can fail and what you can do to support enhancing them.
Complications for Effective Plans
Disconnect can be a major roadblock for meaningful pathways. Consider the curriculum expert, someone with years of experience under their belt and several letters after their name. This person knows how to craft the structure of a plan and knows what is needed to get from A to Z. Unfortunately, some common planning problems can emerge:
- Delivery – The teacher does not have the same point of view or skills as the developer.
- The effectiveness on the ground – The planner cannot account for all eventualities and the facilitator may take the plan as verbatim.
- Longevity – There is potential that the progression is no longer relevant or aligned to the thinking of the learning participants.
- Scope – The depth and breadth of the plan may be too great for the facilitator to skillfully implement the levels of learning inherent in the documentation.
Why the Planner isn’t Always to Blame
Sometimes the depth and breadth of a planner’s vision can make it difficult for facilitators to fully interpret or implement all intended outcomes. The teacher knows their craft, knows the learners and what they need, knows the curriculum, but is not able to follow the sometimes too complex progression.
Fixing the Disconnect: Simple First Steps
- Manageable outcomes, with smaller objectives contained within. This organisation supports formative assessment and clear and meaningful reporting.
- Planning flexibility. This is crucial because of the variety of learning environments as well as different levels of ability in one classroom.
- Opportunities for celebration. Including celebrations can recharge stamina for both learners and teachers during longer coursework.
- Adaptability. Enable adjustments during delivery, like repeating or extending some learning, cutting other areas short, or making new additions and removing obsolete content.
Improving Delivery
Step one with a progression pathway plan is to think about the person who is delivering the material. Are the outcomes, objectives, and success criteria understandable at face value or is time needed to interpret meanings behind the text? Any obstacles to interpreting the intent of the progression leads to different outcomes for different learning environments and different levels of success for different groups.
A Tale of Two Pathways
I remember working with two very different teams developing progression pathways, one for the technologies and one for mathematics.
I worked on the technology plan earlier in my career. It was very high-level and broad in its definition. The plan had three main categories for each outcome and at least three statements, one of each of the categories. This guided teachers in their delivery and allowed teachers freedom to choose content. Sometimes, the freedom was overwhelming. Additionally, the prescribed content was often not specific enough.
Compare this to a later progression I created for mathematics, where each year had on average thirty skill groups and each skill group had on average ten steps. The prescriptive and specific nature of this plan gave teachers the overall goals as well as the blocks that built up success. There was very little opportunity for confusion as the core learning had been distilled into bite size chunks, each of which could be targeted as the teacher saw the need. This prescriptive approach did not stifle teachers’ expression because of the built in flexibility of delivery.
Prescriptive Doesn’t Mean Rigid
Clarity is essential for an effective pathway. Allow for individuality in how lessons look but ensure that the core message that is delivered is the same for each environment. If you have different groups all aiming at the same qualification but the delivery has been interpreted differently from place to place, there is something lacking in the progression document.
Improving Effectiveness
Start with the goal in mind. Start with the objective or the overall outcome. When progression pathways are designed well, they serve multiple audiences — learners, educators, and even the organisations delivering them.
Following a progression of skills and then fitting this to learning statements, from a regional document, is a recipe for disaster. Imagine being given a textbook to use as your resource for a class you are to teach and then being told, “Now you have to ensure all these learning intentions are met.” This approach will result in a patchwork method of planning that loses effectiveness as you progress through the year because you did not know what the goal was before you started: you only have the start.
Once you know, and are clear on, what the goal of the learning is, most resources at your disposal can be used to effectively meet the needs of the participants. You know your goal, break down the larger idea into manageable chunks, use your resource for practice once learners have the tool to effectively engage with the content.
What Success Looks Like in Practice
When I built a progression pathway for an EdTech company delivering robotics education, it was essential that the objectives were aligned with regional standards from around the world. This affected several elements:
- Engagement with learners
Children and young people were aware of what they were learning and practising and could see the results in front of them as they wrote code and built command sequences – reinforcing motivation and mastery. The objectives made sense for where they were. - Support for teachers
Many educators in elementary (primary) education have not received instruction on coding or robotics, so the support materials guided the delivery of the objectives with key vocabulary, step-by-step code, support videos and PowerPoint Presentations. The objectives’ progression developed their skill and confidence with the learning. - Support for company sales
Because the curriculum plans addressed the key elements from the USA’s CSTA framework, England’s National Curriculum, and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, school districts and local councils were able to make multiple purchases to support their school, which in turn supported the company. The objectives being met equipped the sales team with a powerful narrative in their discussions with key stakeholders.
Improving Longevity
A progression plan must be more than a flavour of the month. Development specialists are required to stay abreast of current trends, scientific discoveries, and new learning of historical significance, if that falls to their role of progression creation. But this does not mean that new topics need to be considered for their own plan.
What Deserves a New Pathway — and What Doesn’t
Consider a new civilisation discovered from recently unearthed ruins and preserved monuments. This is a new topic and of significance but creating a plan from something so new becomes both very challenging for the developer and of little individual value to the learner. A more robust approach would be to add additional content to a unit of learning focusing on Ancient Civilisations. The end result of this plan would be to enrich what has already been created:
- An additional geographical civilisation, adding depth to the scope of the ancient world.
- An additional culture, complete with art forms and potentially texts describing ways of life, enabling comparisons and contrast with nearby and far distant civilisations.
- Expanded awareness of the tools used and the processes developed from the tools, further developing a timeline of learning from other civilisations, nearby chronologically.
Or, would you prefer a very narrow plan of the new civilisation. There is always potential that this standalone plan could be sufficient by itself, with a devoted teacher to lead the learning.
Making Room for Change (Even Pluto)
Additionally, a plan needs to be open to change. Consider the solar system. When I was a boy, we had nine planets, and we liked it! Funnily, some teachers didn’t follow scientific news and in one school where I taught, Pluto remained a planet for an extra year, despite input about its demotion.
This change is easy to accommodate. Key vocabulary would need to be altered and introduced. Specifications could be explored allowing for a different look at the current understanding of the solar system, in this instance. Opportunities for visiting specialists, or visits to scientific places of interest, could open up more learning and expand on consolidated knowledge. Or, you could just eliminate Pluto from the plan. Which sounds better to you?
Improving Scope
Some learning can be heavy, challenging, and extensive, in terms of content. The goal of any progression plan is to quickly allow a teacher or facilitator to understand the outcome, design the learning, and assess levels of success. If the time it takes to determine the success of learning is too great, mistakes are made, content is missed, and the structure of the plan topples.
Curriculum planning must clearly direct the teacher to the ‘must have’ elements. The parts of the plan that are essential for success of the whole course. Additionally, progression development should outline an order that is most beneficial, while not being so iron clad that flexibility is outlawed. Different learning environments have different needs, which often require tweaks to order and emphasis.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All – Especially the Second Time
Consider a group of learners who, after completing study in a required subject, failed the final exam. In order to enroll in further study, or entrance into the workplace, they need to achieve the missed qualifications, so they retake the course. Imagine being one of those learners having to sit through the same course with the same progression, the same emphasis, and the same timings. This, as they say, is the definition of insanity: doing the same exact thing and expecting the same result.
But wait, you may say, on the second run they may achieve much better. And I would say to you, “But why did they not the first time?” This second time, you must alter the scope:
- Identify the trouble spots by checking the prior evidence.
- Rebuild the foundation that is necessary to address the wobbly bits.
- Allocate more time for the areas of study you identify as pain points for individuals.
By following this, you maximise the potential for improvement. You maximise the potential for success. As a planner, aim for clarity of purpose and delivery. As a teacher, aim for maximum understanding and look for opportunities to improve at every turn.
Building Pathways that Empower and Don’t Overwhelm
At its best, a progression pathway plan isn’t a solo act. It needs two key voices: the planner and the teacher. It speaks clearly from the planner to the teacher, but it also listens: to feedback, to classroom realities, and to changing needs.
When progression pathways are clear, flexible, and purposeful, they give teachers the confidence to deliver, learners the direction to succeed, and curriculum teams the evidence to refine and evolve.
Whether you’re designing the next great scheme of learning or teaching from one that already exists, curriculum planning is a shared responsibility. Together, developers and facilitators can build something better than either could alone.
Do you have a progression document you’re not sure is working? I help curriculum teams audit, align, and adapt progression pathways for better outcomes — feel free to reach out.