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Last Updated2 June 2023
Using, Adapting and Creating Progressions covers the ways that you can structure, deliver and prepare for lessons. Learn how to put together activities to develop new skills, structure presentations and deliver information. Understand how to create longer teaching sessions to explore the mountain and continue to develop skills.

Progression building (Getting your students from A to B)

Decision Making & Building Progressions

After the lesson setup there will come a time in each lesson when there will be an initial activity, which is analysed before there is an adaptation to the next step. Once this cycle has been repeated multiple times the series of activities can be referred to as a progression.

Another way to describe a progression is the series of steps that were taken to get a student from one point of their development to the next.

Progressions are often described as being linear, logical, gradual, or step-by-step with each step being appropriate for the level of the student.

This may sound simple, but in order for a progression to be all of these things there needs to be some good decisions made by the instructor as to how they adapt to the next step.

Decision making, and why decisions are made, is developed over time as the instructor becomes more experienced. As experience is gained, a good instructor will be able to draw on their prior experiences to help them make more educated decisions.

Being able to recognise common faults or movement patterns, again, help the instructor make educated decisions. This, combined with reflection on what activities have given their student success in the past, will develop an instructor’s decision-making ability.

When making decisions there are three main factors that need to be considered by the instructor in order to build successful progressions:

  1. How much experience does the instructor have?
  2. Where the student is in the skill development process?
  3. Who is the student?

Let’s look at these three decision-making factors in the next three articles.