Elements of Progressive Education at The Gardner School
The purpose of education, according to progressives, is to widen and deepen understandings, enhance social connectedness, and help each individual gain control of the tools for learning.
Education as Growth:
Education addresses the development of dispositions, social skills, social responsibility, character, and creativity, as well as academic skills and knowledge. Education is not merely preparation for the future, but concern for the development of the person.
School as Community:
The school and the classroom are training grounds for learning about being a member of a group, about citizenship, about self in relation to others. Developing a sense of community requires trust, so that all learners will feel supported as they take the risks required in learning.
Learning as a Social Endeavor:
Children achieve understanding of themselves within the context of the group. Social interaction, sharing ideas, activity and meaning are key components of learning. We need to ask ourselves what opportunities we offer children that require/support cooperation, shared experiences, and connectedness. Schools need to prepare children to be citizens in a democracy, motivated to think critically and deeply, consider varied points of view, and act responsibly.
Curriculum:
Curriculum does not simply impart information. Rather it involves students in continuing spirals of inquiry that draw them from one set of answers to deeper questions that reveal connections between the topic at hand and other fundamental ideas, questions, and problems. Students have opportunities to make choices and to frame their own questions.
Curriculum relates to the concerns and experiences of students. Teachers select content and adjust the shape of the curriculum to meet the needs of their students.
Experiential/Contextual Learning:
Learning is most potent when it comes from being actively and directly engaged with personally meaningful experiences with people, materials, and ideas; and from reflecting on those experiences. New ideas take on meaning for children when they see them in relation to other ideas and to their own experience. Learning involves a system of understandings that the child constantly expands and revises.
Teaching methods:
Progressive teaching is a responsive, dynamic, and adaptive process. Teachers focus on actively involving students in constructing their own understandings. Discussion, projects, shared inquiry and problem solving are central to the progressive approach.
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