“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.” – John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)

Think about a time when you were really excited to learn something… Were you vigorously taking notes in a lecture on a topic that you didn’t really care about? Were you watching a grainy, monotone video about the American Revolution? Maybe so! Or maybe you learned something that helped contextualize or re-contextualize something personal to you. Maybe you and a group of classmates solved something you had been working on together. When you were really excited during this moment, were you a passive learner or an active learner? I’m willing to bet it was the latter.

While it is difficult to define in prompt terms, progressive education can be described as a combination of collaboration, community, social justice, intrinsic motivation, deep understanding, and active learning (Kohn 2008). Boiling it down even further, progressive education shifts focus from the student being a passive learner under more traditional forms of education to the student being an active learner. Active learning isn’t just limited to the student’s engagement with the material they are learning about. They are engaging with their peers and the world around them to figure how the topics they are learning about fit into it. As we learned from Vygotsky early in the course, cognitive development and learning aren’t just about the intake of information into a child’s mind while their brain develops as time slowly passes. Social interaction, one of the main tenets of progressive education, guides learning and cognitive development (McLeod 2018).

You may be thinking, and Kohn poses this exact question, “If progressive education is so terrific, why is it still the exception rather than the rule?” First off, the familiarity with the dominant, traditional form of education makes it easier for educators to execute. The simplicity of being able to present vast amounts of information in the hopes that students remember it compared to the complexity of critically engaging and evaluating the mental processes of students is a main reason why traditional education has remained so steadfast. Facilitating learning is much harder than it sounds. Along with educators, it also asks a lot more of students. Progressive education requires students to rely on their independence for learning, and the transition from dependent to independent learning could take up until the third grade, sometimes even past that especially in underserved communities (Hammond p. 13).

Seifert and Sutton discussed the ways in which teaching has changed over the past few decades, but the ways they touched on, such as increased diversity, increased instructional technology, and greater accountability for educators (p. 10) don’t exactly indicate a shift from a traditional approach to a progressive approach to education. Progress in terms of diversity, technology, and teacher-professionalism are obviously good things in their own right and can contribute to a progressive environment in education, but they don’t constitute progressive education on their own. As Kohn’s research shows, many classrooms seeing these exact developments are still using more traditional approaches to education. Progressive education is still a rarity.

Kayla Delzer’s Ted Talk “Reimagining Classrooms: Teachers as Learners and Students as Leaders” shows how these advancements in technology can go hand-in-hand with the expansion of progressive education.

Delzer takes what I see as the best approach to getting people on board with a shift to progressive education, which is to show them how compatible it is with the ways in which society is changing. It is much easier for students, with the technological tools they have at their disposal, to become active, independent learners now than it was even 10 years ago. John Dewey may have envisioned a progressive education system long before iPads existed, but they may now help fully realize his vision.

“What would a classroom that implemented a progressive approach for the education of its students even look like?” is a question one who isn’t familiar with this concept or might be critical of it might ask. Well…

I know it’s daunting. The complete overhaul of our education system is an almost unimaginable task that would require great dedication from educators, students, and communities as a whole. We, as a society, have an opportunity though, and now is as good of a time as ever to fully embrace progressive education.

References:

Delzer, Kayla (2015, October 13). Reimagining Classrooms: Teachers as Learners and Students as Leaders. TEDx Talks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6vVXmwYvgs

Dewey, John (1916). Democracy and Education. Macmillan Publishers.

Hammond, Zaretta, & Jackson, Yvette (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin, a SAGE Company.

Kohn, Alfie (2008). Progressive Education Why It’s Hard to Beat, but Also Hard to Find. Retrieved June 9th from https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/progressive-education/

Mcleod, Saul (2018). Lee Vygotsky. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html

NBC4 WCMH-TV Columbus (2012, April 27). Progressive Education Program. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XycNgAEXiGo

Ryan, D. P. (2017, October 31). “Why Progressive Education?” The Progressive Education Approach. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/aIXM4rt736I

Seifert, Kevin, & Sutton, Rosemary (2009). Educational Psychology (2nd ed.). The Saylor Foundation.