Читать книгу Learning to Connect - Victoria Theisen-Homer - Страница 8

In the early 20th century, John Dewey and a series of other prominent educators led a new movement in education toward the individualization of curricula and instruction to better suit the needs and interests of students, which became progressive education. Progressive education eschews traditional didactic modes of instruction in which the teacher dispenses predetermined lessons upon all children. Instead, progressive education is “student centered” in that it focuses on each child’s individual needs and attempts to respond to these through varied experiences in the classroom.^[35]

As Rugg and Shumaker—champions of progressive education in the 1900s—espoused in their 1928 text The Child-Centered School, progressive education “has coursing through it a unitary integrating theme: individuality, personality, experience.”^[36] While it rose to prominence over 120 years ago, progressive education is still practiced in many schools and classrooms across the world, particularly independent, charter, and magnet schools. Some prominent examples include Theodore Sizer’s “Essential schools,” Expeditionary Learning schools, High Tech High and its network, and many Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia schools.

In action, progressive education favors a constructivist approach to learning that involves cooperative assignments, inquiry-based projects, “hands-on” activity, and real-life application.^[37] Different students may be concurrently working on different activities and moving forward at different paces, depending on what each child needs. Students not only have a great deal of agency over what they are learning, but also how they want to approach it.