by Larry Ainsworth

Clarity’s Next Steps

In Part 1 of our May 2026 blog and newsletter, “Starting the New School Year Right”, I wrote about the clarity that must come first — knowing your Essential Standards, "unwrapping" them for teacher clarity, and then translating them into Student Learning Targets and Success Criteria that simplify the learning destination for students. This clarity is essential, but it's also just the beginning.

When your students are in front of you, the question now becomes: How do I turn this clarity into daily instruction that moves my students forward — and how do I know, in real time, whether it's working?

Here in Part 2, I’ll share with you how every PK-12 educator in every content area can answer this important question for starting the new school year right—with Learning Progressions that become the roadmap for daily instruction along with Quick Progress Checks that provide timely feedback you can use to adjust instruction as you follow that roadmap to its destination, and your students can use to adjust their learning progress along the way.

Build the Instructional Pathway: Learning Progressions

Learning Progressions are the “building blocks” of planned instruction that create the learning pathway through a unit of study to its end. When educators design their Learning Progressions, they begin “with the end in mind”, deciding what concepts and skills—from simple to complex—that students must progressively acquire so they can ultimately demonstrate their understanding of the more rigorous concepts and skills in the “unwrapped” Essential Standards.

Once these Learning Progressions are determined, the teacher or grade-level/course-level teacher team arranges these “building blocks” in a logical instructional sequence or “instructionally defensible sequence” (Popham, Transformative Assessment, 2008), in which they will occur during the unit.

Here is an example of a middle school science “unwrapped” Essential Standard with its Student Learning Target and the educator-planned instructional pathway of Learning Progressions. Notice how the sixth Learning Progression intentionally matches the “unwrapped” Essential Standard and Student Learning Target students are to achieve:

MS-LS1-2. DEVELOP and USE a model TO DESCRIBE the function of a cell as a whole and ways parts of cells contribute to the function.

 Student Learning Target:

In this unit, you will learn how to describe how the cell works, using a model you construct.

Learning Progressions in a Suggested Sequence for Instruction:

1.  Understand and explain how cells are the basic units of life.
2.  Describe the function and structure of cells.
3. Identify cells within a variety of different living things or parts of living things.
4. Identify the parts of a cell and describe the function of each part.
5. Construct an accurate model of a cell.
6. Use the cell model to explain how the parts of a cell work together to support the function of the whole cell.

This suggested sequence is not intended to be a “one size fits all” pathway that works for all students. Educators know that learning is not linear. Not all students (or adults) can or will learn by following a strict linear path of instruction. The primary goal here is to start with a basic pathway and then make necessary adjustments, depending on the needs of learners, differentiating the methods by which all students traverse that pathway and adjusting the pace of learning whenever needed. This will ensure that eventually all students can and will achieve the end goal—accomplishment of the “unwrapped” Essential Standards—and be able to produce evidence of that accomplishment on formative and summative assessments.

Margaret Heritage explains the value of pre-planning the instructional sequence of Learning Progressions in connection with formative assessment and feedback: “Explicit learning progressions can provide the clarity that teachers need. When teachers understand the continuum of learning in a domain and have information [through formative assessment] about [students’] present status relative to the learning goals, they are better able to make decisions about what the next steps in learning should be. (Formative Assessment: Making it Happen in The Classroom, 2010, p. 39).

Check for Understanding: Quick Progress Checks

Once you have planned a sequence of instruction, the next question is just as important: How will I find out, by the end of each day’s lesson, whether my students truly understood it?

Quick Progress Checks are short, in-the-moment, formative assessments that students complete at or near the close of daily instruction. Think of them as well-constructed “exit tickets”, (i.e. intentionally aligned to the skills, concepts, and rigor of a lesson-specific Learning Progression). Student responses to a well-designed Quick Progress Check provide reliable evidence of students’ current understanding.

To make sure they can provide timely follow-up instruction, and that students can receive the related feedback in a timely manner, educators need to quickly determine whether all, many, few, or only individual students need reteaching to correct misconceptions and close identified learning gaps. And this is why I named these checks, “quick”! To be practical, they can’t require too much time for educators to review their students’ responses and then to decide their next instructional steps.

Close the Gap: Feedback to Adjust Instruction and Student Learning

In educational research, effect sizes correlate the relationship between two variables, i.e., any educational practice and its impact on student learning. An effect size of 0.40 equates to approximately one year of growth in student learning during one school year. John Hattie's research places feedback among the most powerful influences on student achievement, with an average effect size of 0.79, nearly doubling that impact.

Feedback enables educators to correctly interpret what students need next in their learning and then to adjust their follow-up instruction appropriately to meet those identified learning needs. Responding instructionally to what the feedback indicates that students need next in their learning is the whole purpose of educators using formative assessment—to inform instruction so that there is a positive change in student understanding.

When the results of these Quick Progress Checks are also shared with students, they too can use that feedback to adjust their own learning strategies and move forward in their understanding of the lesson-specific learning focus.

“Feedback serves various purposes in reducing the (learning) gap: it can provide cues that capture a student’s attention and helps him or her focus on succeeding with the task; it can direct attention toward the processes needed to accomplish the task; it can provide information about ideas that have been misunderstood; and it can be motivational so that students invest more effort or skill in the task” (Hattie, Visible Learning for Teachers, 2012, p. 115).

I encourage educators to think in terms of a simple, repeatable cycle: Teach – Assess – Interpret – Adjust.

1. Teach the Learning Progression.
2. Assess with a Quick Progress Check.
3. Interpret the results — not just which students responded incorrectly, but why. Was it a simple mistake? A partial understanding? A genuine misconception that needs reteaching?
4. Adjust —follow-up instruction and, just as importantly, your students' own learning strategies, by sharing feedback with them clearly and specifically with suggestions to help them improve.

When students receive feedback in a way they can understand and use — “here's what you did well, here's the gap, here's what to try next” — we are teaching them how to reflect on their own progress and then act on that feedback to improve.

Initial Planning for Yearlong Benefits

Keep this simple! Start small and add this set of clarity tools into your instruction slowly. Choose one Essential Standard you have already "unwrapped" and brainstorm an instructional sequence of three or four Learning Progressions to achieve it. Plan a Quick Progress Check for one of them. Then follow the Teach – Assess – Interpret – Adjust quartet described above. Try it, it works!

Once you have seen the difference this makes in both the effectiveness of your instruction and the resulting improvement in your students’ learning, you will find yourself using Learning Progressions and related Quick Progress Checks throughout the school year!

If you would like to know more about any of the information presented in these two “Start the School Year Right!” July-August blogs and related newsletters, Volumes 1 and 3 of my Integrating Teaching and Learning series (2024) will greatly help you successfully implement these “timeless” essential practices with numerous examples across the grades and content areas, plus show you how A.I. can assist you as a “thought partner” to quickly and reliably create them.

Also, all these topics all available as virtual workshops that you can bring to your school or district so you can get started right away! 

Wishing you and your students a rewarding 2026-27 school year that moves instruction and student learning forward with greater clarity!

Larry Ainsworth

[email protected]

Recommended CLARITY PATHWAY Reading/Resources: 

For more information on Larry's Integrated Teaching and Learning System (ITLS) and related “timeless essentials” (“Unwrapping” Essential Standards, Student Learning Targets, Success Criteria, Quick Progress Checks, Standards-Aligned Learning Tasks, and more), check out the following resources:

• ITLS books: Books 
• What is an Integrated Teaching & Learning System? Blog
• ITLS recent  blogs 
• Free Monthly Newsletter: Subscribe
• Online ITLS video courses: Courses

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If you have any questions that we can assist you in answering, please contact us at www.larryainsworth-claritypathway.com.

Thank you for all you do for the students you serve!

Copyright © 2026. Larry Ainsworth. Includes excerpts from Volume Three of Integrated Teaching and Learning: "Timeless Essentials" for Creating Integrated Units of Study. All rights reserved.