What is Progressive Education?

Parents researching K-12 schools for their children may come across the term “progressive education.”

While schools may vary in how they define this approach, the nonprofit Progressive Education Network says progressive schools aim to engage students “as active participants in their learning and in society.” Whether public or private, these schools generally offer a project-based curriculum with an emphasis on students’ agency in their learning.

Progressive education is rooted in the ideas of early 20th-century education reformers like John Dewey. He called for an approach where children were placed at the center of their own learning, and believed education should be active and hands-on; that students should be thinking, doing and experimenting instead of sitting quietly and memorizing. Now known as “the father of progressive education,” Dewey’s vision continues to influence schools across the country today.

An Active Approach to Learning

PEN’s website lists educational principles for progressive schools, including active student participation in learning; recognizing and building on students’ “innate desire to learn,” and a collaborative approach between students, educators and the community. These schools believe that education should prepare students to be “engaged citizens in the broader world.”

Giving students agency in their learning is a key tenet of progressive education, explains Matt Thornton, director of admissions at the Robert C. Parker School, a progressive pre-K–8 school near Albany, New York. “Students really need to be aware of the world around them. They also need to have a lot of meaning in the work,” he says. Students attain this level of ownership in their learning by engaging in “projects that are meaningful, that actually have value to the school or to the wider community.”

Parker and other progressive schools use projects as a form of assessment, with students sharing their original ideas with their teachers, classmates, family members and even experts in the field.

Maia Cucchiara, an associate professor at Temple University’s College of Education, says that progressive teachers prioritize student interests as they plan lessons, an approach she calls “student-centered learning.”

“You start the instruction by focusing on the students’ interests and needs and how the students would engage with the material,” she says.

What Progressive Education Looks Like

With students empowered to take so much responsibility for their learning, a progressive classroom is likely to look different than a traditional one. Children solving problems together may create a louder environment than a room where they are listening to a teacher lecture. But Doug Knecht, dean of children’s programs and head of the Bank Street School for Children in New York City, says that there is an underlying plan and routine. “When progressive education is done well … there’s a ton of structure.”

Projects are often immersive, collaborative and multidisciplinary. For example, kindergarten students at Parker do an annual project on maple syrup that incorporates science by looking at weather patterns and trees; social studies and history by learning about the Indigenous traditions of sugaring; and literacy as students read about the process and stories behind it. Each year, the approach to teaching the unit is also shaped by the interests of a particular class.

Knecht says the progressive model requires teachers to have a lot of skill, as they should know each student as a “whole person” – including their cultures, their families and their strengths – to engage them in learning. Social-emotional learning is as important as academics in a progressive classroom. And Knecht says progressive educators also respond to developments in the science of education, for example by incorporating more phonics into reading instruction, in line with cognitive research.

Evaluating Results

When students study issues they are personally invested in, experts say, their learning becomes deeper. Knecht says studies have shown heightened brain activity when students have an opportunity to pursue the things they care about.

Still, experts say that more research is needed to effectively measure student learning and longer-term outcomes. Cucchiara says that the skills progressive schools seek to develop in students, including personal agency, communication, critical thinking and passion for learning, can be more difficult to measure than, say, whether they know how to diagram a sentence.

“We haven’t as a field figured out how to measure (these skills) in a way that’s credible to the outside world,” she says.

Some research is promising, including a 2020 report showing that economically disadvantaged students in New York state who attended certain high schools implementing progressive, project-based assessments in lieu of exams were “more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, and persist in college than demographically similar peers.” The project-based assessment model is cited in the paper as an authentic means of evaluation that can potentially “help narrow race, class, and linguistic gaps in secondary and higher education achievement.”

Thornton notes that effective progressive schools use standards and track milestones for all students. And he says there’s value for students in receiving immediate feedback, as opposed to assessing their skills at the end of a unit, explaining that it encourages them “to take their learning and work to a much more exceptional level.”

Is a Progressive School the Right Fit?

Experts say that progressive schools can work well for almost any child since the model is so focused on the development of each individual student. Knecht says that there’s often a perception that children need to be “highly verbal” to be successful as so much of the curriculum is discussion-based, but that introverted children can also succeed.

Some students who have trouble working independently or who need a lot of direct instruction may struggle with this model, Cucchiara says, but it’s often a good fit for students who have trouble sitting still in traditional classrooms and who appreciate the hands-on approach.

Buying into the school’s greater mission matters, Thornton says, as parents and caregivers are asked to engage and to reinforce learning concepts at home. “You do have to have that feeling of raising citizens for a democratic society.”

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