Spectrum School

What is Progressive Education? Attending to the whole child: Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become good people not just good learners Community: Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children-separate selves at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning Collaboration: Progressive schools are characterized by what we like to call a “working with” rather than a “doing to” model Intrinsic motivation: Progressive educators are likely to ask “what’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?” Active Learning: In progressive schools, students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they- and their teachers- have been Deep Understanding: Progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects and questions- rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines. The teaching is interdisciplinary…to invite them to think deeply about issues that matter and help them understand ideas from the inside out Taking Kids Seriously: Progressive educators take their cue from the children- and are particularly attentive to differences among them (Taken from http://www.alfiekohn.org)