Comparing Progressive and Traditional Educational Approaches

Progressive Schools – Progressive Education


Comparing Progressive and Traditional Education:

Progressive Education

• progressive education is child-centered.
• each child is honored and celebrated.
• the teacher-learner relationship is considered primary – a pre-cursor to effective teaching and student learning.

Traditional Education

• traditional education is subject/content and classroom oriented.
• the individual is largely subsumed by the group.
• the teacher-learner relationship is secondary and hierarchical.

Progressive Education

• progressive education is characterized by a whole-child orientation: cognitive, social, and emotional development of each student are considered key to that student's educational and personal growth.

Traditional Education

• in a traditional educational environment, each child is treated the same. Students are generally assumed to be equally ready to learn the prescribed content. Individual differences in background and social/cognitive/emotional/physical/moral development are largely ignored except insofar as they allow students to be grouped by ability/achievement into advanced, average or remedial tracks. Students with learning differences are largely expected to keep up by compensating on their own for attention, executive-function, and psychosocial deficits.

An example of progressive approaches to teaching and learning:

Two students – who happen to be brother and sister – take a required computer course. The brother is a techno-wizard and is given the opportunity to work with other students in the capacity of assistant teacher while at the same time pursuing Java (the language of AP Computer Science) programming. The sister, an artist, has little interest in computers as anything other than fancy typewriters; she is invited to explore graphics protocols. Both students become engrossed in their differentiated tasks. Both master the basic requirements of the course; one earns the highest possible score on the AP Computer Science exam, while the other produces original and aesthetically pleasing fractal art.
Progressive Education

• students actively participate in constructing their own learning, building their own under-standing, and integrating skills, information, and concepts.
• progressive education is service oriented; students have opportunities to give back to their communities on a voluntary basis.

Traditional Education

• learning is primarily prescribed by curriculum guides, textbooks, and standardized measures of achievement. Grades and standardized test scores dictate the track to which a student is assigned. All students complete the same work and are evaluated in the same way, usually through paper and pencil tests over content knowledge.
• community service has only recently become a part of traditional education where it tends to be prescribed and required.

Progressive Education

• subjects are often integrated and taught in interdisciplinary ways.
• in progressive education, ethics and morality are explicit parts of all curricula.
• all students succeed, albeit in different ways.
• cooperation is stressed over competition.

Traditional Education

• subjects are treated largely as separate entities; inter-disciplinary instruction is comparatively rare.
• morality and character development are thought to lie within the domain of students' parents or of religious institutions.
• if one student earns an “A”, another will earn an “F”. Some students fail.
• students compete against one another and are compared to each other.

Progressive Education

• learning atmosphere is characterized by low anxiety and high challenge.
•process orientated: students learn critical thinking skills, cooperative social skills, and adaptability within a broad framework of subjects and disciplines.
• features continuous progress – students are met where they are and moved toward who they are to be. Students move on once they have mastered skills, processes, and content knowledge.


Traditional Education

• learning atmosphere is often characterized by high anxiety – low challenge and boredom for gifted students and fear of failure by average students.
• product oriented: graduates who have learned the information required by mandated curriculum standards are thought of as the end product of a traditional education.
• a goal is to make curricula "teacher proof", meaning that students will learn the content irrespective of the skills, knowledge, and resourcefulness of individual teachers. The teacher uses the same methods, materials, and evaluations for all students.

Progressive Education

• characterized by differentiation by teachers with respect to instructional strategies, curriculum, and the way in which standards are met.
• characterized by relatively high levels of choice by students with respect to course of study, learning modalities, dress.

Traditional Education

• students have few choices as to what classes they take and even fewer choices as to how they demonstrate their mastery in a given class (performance on tests).
• characterized by explicit dress codes for students and teachers, and often by uniforms for students.

An example of progressive approaches to teaching and learning:

Three students comprise a problem-solving triad in a physics class. One is a superior math student who has shown herself capable of quickly mastering any new type of problem. She divides her group work time between tutoring her partners, who are not so facile as she, and finding – with the help of the teacher -- difficult problems with which to challenge herself. All members of the group benefit. By teaching others, the physics ace cements her understanding of processes and content. At the same time, her partners learn from more one-on-one instruction than the teacher alone can feasibly provide. As the partners practice with core problems, the ace pursues advanced problems.

Note:

Many traditional schools exhibit some progressive education characteristics – for example, approximations of differentiated instruction, mixed-ability classrooms, cooperative learning, and so-called authentic assessment. Many teachers in traditional schools, despite a climate that does not reward progressive approaches, intuitively employ progressive methods. Many schools that are predominantly progressive possess traditional attributes, particularly at the high school level. For example, they may use numerical grades, and offer AP classes or honors curricula. They are more content-driven as dictated by the conundrum of college preparation.

Does progressive education work?

Progressive education is a rich Western (and Eastern) educational tradition. In the United States in 1918, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education promulgated a set of Cardinal Principles of education that included health, command of fundamental processes, worthy home membership, vocation, citizenship, worthy use of leisure time, and ethical character. These principles are at the heart of a progressive education movement whose proponents include Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, John Gardner, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Maria Montessori.

Students educated in progressive school perform as well as students in traditional schools on all measures of learning and achievement. In addition, once they enter the world of work, they are better problem-solvers, they are more adaptable to change, and they are better work-team members than their traditionally educated peers.

One of the reasons that the United States maintains an edge in technical inventiveness and general creativity is that progressive approaches have been a significant part of American education since the early 1900's. That the U.S. has begun to lose ground in the inventive/creative realm is attributable to a resurgence of strictly traditional approaches under the guise of efficiency and accountability.

The educational and social science literature explicitly validates many aspects of progressive education; other aspects are supported anecdotally. Progressive education provides teachers and students multiple pathways toward meeting real-world educational standards.

What impedes progressive education in the Twenty-First Century?

The current political climate seeks simplistic and inexpensive solutions to the problems of education in America, specifically, over-emphasis on testing for specific content standards that results in so-called ability grouping or tracking of students. A politics-imbued educational philosophy that attempts to take the teacher-learner relationship out of the education equation. Many families have sought to escape the problems of public education by sending their children to private schools or by home-schooling them. Parents expect their children to live better – meaning materially more successfully -- than they, themselves, have lived. For example, they expect their children to attend prestigious colleges, to score well on standardized tests, and to secure high paying jobs. These expectations can yield an emphasis on material wealth over ethical character and lead to a sense of entitlement among students, especially those in the higher socio-economic strata of society. Parents place too early and too much emphasis on learning ultra-specific skills such as ballet, sports, and foreign languages – the so-called hurried child syndrome.