The first thing to know is that there is no one-size-fits-all in progressive education. Unlike a unit plan or package that districts buy from a curriculum company that will be identical from classroom to classroom, progressive education will look different depending on the school. However, educators and schools that share the progressive label generally also share several common beliefs and practices, even if these beliefs and practices are emphasized and implemented differently:

• ✅Collaborative community school culture
• ✅Rooted in belonging, relevance, and self-regulation
• ✅Emphasis on student voice and choice
• ✅Student-driven, interdisciplinary project-based learning
• ✅Feedback-driven assessment
• ✅Portfolio-based grading

Collaborative community school culture: Classroom and school norms (sometimes called collective commitments) are determined collaboratively, agreed upon, and administered by students and teachers alike. These are used as a set of common values that guide other aspects of the school culture and experience.

Rooted in belonging, relevance, and self-regulation: Since we know it takes more than just academic content to grow happy, healthy kids, progressive education views school as a place not just to communicate important academic learning but to support every aspect of healthy child development. Some people might view changes made to school in the name of healthy human development as detracting from the ability of students to learn academic content and skills, but progressive educators view these as shared goals. Supporting healthy human development is a path toward better learning and growing better human beings!

Emphasis on student voice and choice: If all things improve with practice, providing kids opportunities to make decisions for themselves lets them practice self-regulation and decision-making in an environment where adult support is high and where the stakes are low. Choice is trust, and kids need to be trusted so they can also be trustworthy!

Student-driven, interdisciplinary project-based learning: We know learning has the most impact when it is meaningful, connects with what students already know, and challenges them to do something real in the world that they couldn’t do before. So rather than move from English to math and from social studies to science class to learn academic content and skills separately, interdisciplinary project-based learning requires content and skills from multiple subject areas to successfully complete. Project ideas usually come from students or the community itself.

Feedback-driven assessment: Whether it comes from teachers, technology, the environment, peers and colleagues, or yourself, feedback is necessary for learning and growth. Progressive educators create  structures that help students give, receive, and act on feedback through a process called iteration.  Iteration is the same process that companies use to beta test products and services before official release or to grow a product from version 1.0 to 2.0, and it works well for humans, too!

Portfolio-based grading: After receiving and implementing feedback, students are in charge of curating and adding artifacts of their learning to a physical or digital portfolio. This portfolio is a way for students to put their best foot forward and represent their new learning. These artifacts can include photographs documenting the creation process (like those seen below), video clips, written reflections, and examples of finished products themselves. A grade is usually determined collaboratively between teachers and students as a result of the finished portfolio. Portfolios and public demonstrations are one way to make the learning process self-evident to people outside of the classroom.

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Because progressive education isn’t just a single lesson plan or unit, the beliefs and practices mentioned in the previous section usually change what the experience of school looks, sounds, and feels like for students, teachers, and caregivers alike. 

We’ve never been in a classroom or school that was 100% “progressive” or “traditional”, it’s never all-or-nothing. This is also not necessarily a list of “good” vs “bad” practices. Rather, when we look at progressive education compared to what happens in a typical school, we see a range of beliefs and practices around instruction, assessment and grading, and behavior and motivation:

If you walked into a classroom where students are primarily engaged in…

• ✅collaborative, 
• ✅interdisciplinary project-based work, 
• ✅interacting with a range of age levels and community connections, 
• ✅getting feedback and improving upon it without a grade, 
• ✅where that work results in some kind of public audience or performance, 
• ✅adding that work and reflecting on it in a physical or digital portfolio, 
• ✅and making most of their own decisions about how to manage themselves in a learning space, 

…it would be safe to call that a progressive classroom.

Educators and schools that use the label “progressive” usually trace it back to the ideas of John Dewey, an early 20th-century American educator, philosopher, and psychologist. Dewey thought that the typical school experience was not developmentally appropriate or connected in meaningful ways to the lives of children and was not serving society very well as a result. The important content and skills we want kids to learn can’t just be delivered like dropping mail in the slot. Dewey instead believed that education was the “process of living and not a preparation for future living,” and that schools should be places of social collaboration and real-world problem solving. This kind of education, he argued, was also the best way to learn and practice the habits of self-determination and self-governance important to American democratic society. The phrase “progressive education” was used at the time to distinguish it from “traditional education” and the label, and the distinction, has stuck ever since. 

Since it can be confusing here in the 21st century, instead of adopting the “progressive” label, many educators and schools use descriptions like student-centered, human-centered, experiential, innovative, or project-based as a way to refer to what students are doing. There are some schools created around specific progressive models – maybe you’ve heard of Montessori Schools, for example – where there is overlap in the emphasis on student-driven inquiry, but not every progressive education school or classroom is Montessori-based. Further, progressive education overlaps with our understanding of educating youth prior to the more standardized model.

“How do we know school is working?” is an important question, and there are many sources of information that can help inform an answer. Since progressive education emphasizes overall healthy child development, schools that shift toward progressive practices often do so in response to unmet needs communicated by students and the community. This can come from survey results, focus groups, student/parent advisory boards, or other ways that schools gather feedback. 

For example, in 2016, a national survey of over 900,000 students in grades 5-12 found that a majority of students hit an “engagement cliff” in middle school and never recover: two-thirds of students are either not engaged or “actively disengaged” by the time they reach senior year.

In another national survey of over 21,000 high school students, students reported feeling “tired”, “stressed”, and “bored” more than any other emotion. In an in-depth follow-up, “75% of all feelings students reported...were negative."

When surveyed, 96% of teenagers report that anxiety and depression are a problem their peers face, with 70% identifying them as major problems. And sadly, youth suicide rates increase dramatically during the school year. Schools are obviously not the sole cause of anxiety and depression in teenagers, but schools can be powerful places to help students foster a sense of purpose, connect to a caring and supportive community of peers and adults, and overcome challenges that pop-up both inside and outside of school. Students who are not at school, who aren’t engaged when they’re at school, and don’t feel hopeful about the future are not on the right path to become their best selves.

This shift is also supported by research about purpose-finding in young people. Dr. William Damon is a psychologist who wrote The Path To Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life based on a groundbreaking study he conducted around this topic. He found that the majority of young people in his study lacked direction and connection to a greater purpose, and only 1 in 5 were truly purpose-driven, meaning they are grounded in purposeful activities with a clear sense of what they are doing in the world and why. Purposeful people have a big picture goal for themselves or cause that they’ve committed to, and they know the steps to achieve their next action. Reflecting on his findings and what they mean for parents and educators, he wrote: 

“These brilliant students would not be losing their motivation in college if they brought with them a better understanding of what they wanted to accomplish and why. If, during the early years of strenuous effort and high achievement, they had found purposes that went deeper than the grades and awards, they would have hit the ground running when they entered college…

For this reason, adults who wish to help young people find their purposes are in a somewhat awkward position. We cannot present a ready-made purpose to a young person and expect that it will suit her comfortably. We can and should, however, introduce inspiring ideas, and sources of ideas—people, books, religious or secular organizations—that may provide young people with the inspirations that will get them on their way. We also can create conditions that facilitate their own efforts to fashion purposes.”

So what would a school look like that responded to this data about student engagement, stress, purpose, and belonging the same way they would respond to standardized test scores? Using similar survey methods, one public middle school found that only about 1 in 4 students were engaged at school and less than half felt hopeful. Half of students reported being actively disengaged and feeling “stuck” or “discouraged”. Absenteeism was also a major issue, as 1 in 5 students were reported chronically absent. The school conducted student focus groups to better understand specific challenges that needed to be addressed and changes that needed to be made. 

For this school, their data about the lack of engagement, hope, and belonging was a signal that the typical, business-as-usual school day was not working and led leadership to make significant progressive changes. Since students who are engaged, hopeful, and feel connected to their school community are going to learn better and feel better about their learning, this school implemented many of the elements of progressive education in order to create a purposeful school day that prioritized engagement, hope, and belonging. 

Below is another example of a public school district responding to survey data and student focus groups that communicated a similar need for change. This district decided to make changes that included:

• ✅ more hands-on and interactive learning experiences providing more downtime between classes for mental regrouping
• ✅interdisciplinary connections
• ✅providing outdoor time for students to recharge 
• ✅collecting feedback from students 
• ✅encouraging more opportunities for student choice in assignments, projects, and learning methods across all subjects. 

When the phrase “evidence-based” practice is used by policymakers, it generally refers to actions and strategies that have some direct connection to improving learning outcomes. So if we’re asking “what works” to improve learning outcomes, we first have to decide what those learning outcomes should be. 

Of course we want to use the evidence-based practices that help kids learn to read and write and think mathematically and scientifically, and when we are thinking about child development and progressive education the question is not only what we want kids to know but  “Who do we want them to be when they grow up?” Students who are happier and healthier, who feel engaged and purposeful, and connect with their peers, adults, and the community around them are going to learn more and have a better life trajectory than those who do not. Towards these goals, progressive education is evidence-based education, and progressive practices can not only help kids learn but also help them become better human beings. 

Some recent breakthroughs in brain science have even helped make the case for progressive education. Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and researcher who studies the effects of emotion, learning, and the brain, argues based on her work that this kind of thinking is exactly what grows teens brains and leads to positive life outcomes:

“What actually allows us to predict the growth – the physical growth and the change in function – of teenagers’ brains across years and into adulthood, which in turn predicts their young adult happiness, how productive they are, how well they do in school, how much they like their close relationships, how coherent their identity is, how purposeful they feel their life is – really important stuff about people’s outcomes – what predicts that is not what they know, it’s how they think. It’s the dispositions they bring to the world as they engage with complex problems, and with open-ended problems without one answer.”

In an example that hits home with any parent’s struggle with naps and bedtimes, University of Virginia researchers Bob Pianta and Tara Hofkens argue learning is like sleep:

“Learning isn’t something that educators do to children, and it’s not something they can make happen or make children do. What educators can do is set up the conditions under which learning is likely to happen and use measures that accurately and robustly capture what was learned. Sleep is an example. Parents can’t actually make their children fall asleep. It’s not a behavior that they can demand or directly control. Instead, parents focus on setting up the conditions under which the processes of falling and staying asleep are likely to happen.”

We can’t make kids learn any more than we can (ethically) make them sleep. What we can do is create healthy supportive conditions for learning to happen. Kids experience school with whole brains and growing bodies, within rich social and emotional interactions between their peers and adults, and of course within school with its academic subjects and the world outside of it. The goal of progressive education is to create healthy conditions for learning and fill them with supportive, trusting adults who craft rich, student-centered learning experiences. 

Models like those from The Center for Whole-Child Education at Arizona State University help us understand how “whole-child purpose is ingrained in every aspect of school design — from curriculum to assessments, the structure of school scheduling and spaces, staffing and professional development, and more.”

Human Restoration Project presents a similar model of progressive education in schools: learning is rooted in purpose-finding and relevance, social justice as the cornerstone of educational success, dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools, and learners are respectful of each other’s innate human worth.

An iceberg is a helpful way to think about academic assessment, grading, and reporting in progressive education: there’s a lot happening under the surface that we don’t see!

We know learning is complex and has many moving parts, and we know students are always learning something. Progressive educators take on the role of project manager, helping provide structure, challenging student thinking, and making student learning visible. Teachers track student progress on project goals, evaluate and provide feedback on student work, and students respond to feedback and make recommended changes. Students then collect evidence and decide how to represent their learning by adding artifacts to a portfolio. This usually also includes reflections and other statements to help others make sense of those artifacts. In-progress learning, teacher feedback and progress tracking, and the collection of portfolio artifacts are half of the process that families and caregivers generally don’t see. 

Where learning is made visible is in the form of completed portfolios and public exhibitions of learning where students showcase their finalized projects. Here’s another way to visualize the relationship between learning, assessment, and reporting. Think of it as a horizontal iceberg, where the complex, often hidden work of student learning happens on the left, and the visible, finished part of learning is represented to families on the right:

“College and career readiness” typically focuses on a specific list of important curriculum content and skills that kids need to know to make a successful transition out of high school. But there are also a number of important non-academic factors that the emphasis on curriculum content and skills leaves out. 

We can all think of intelligent, hard-working students who graduate high school and struggle for reasons unrelated to their GPA and SAT score. More than one million college students drop out each year and only two-thirds of students complete a four-year degree without delay. According to a recent survey, 42% of college students who have seriously considered leaving college cite “mental health challenges” or “motivation and life changes” as the reason. Living away from home for the first time, meeting new people and making friends, balancing academic and social responsibilities – all in a low-support, high-stakes environment – are often too much to take on at once.  

For incoming students, UNC Charlotte provides a list of skills for college success, saying, “Succeeding in college does not just mean sitting in class, taking notes and doing well on exams. Possessing certain skills will help students be successful in all aspects of college — inside and outside the classroom.” They cite assertiveness, responsibility, tolerance for ambiguity, at ease with diversity, creative thinking, having personal goals, and being engaged as key to a successful college experience, alongside a number of “soft skills”: self-management, communication, collaboration, independent work, critical-thinking, and study habits.

These college-ready habits, attitudes, and skills overlap with those cited by the World Economic Forum as they surveyed the top job skills of the 2020s: analytical thinking and innovation, active learning and learning strategies, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility, creativity, originality and initiative, to name a few.

All of these habits, attitudes, and skills cited by colleges and employers – collaboration and communication, self-direction and responsibility, goal-setting and organizing, creative thinking and active learning, resilience and ideation – form the core student experience of a progressive education! Just as we want kids to practice reading and math to become fluent, practicing these skills in a high-support, low-stakes K-12 school environment sets children up for success in the low-support, high-stakes environments of both college and career. Outside the walls of school it may matter less what you know for the test and matter a great deal what you can do with what you know and how you can work with others to get it done.

One great example of progressive education succeeding in a public school district is the Community Lab School (CLS) in Charlottesville, Virginia. CLS is a public grade 6-12 school that focuses on “deeper learning through interdisciplinary, project-based, and experiential approaches to instruction.” With the exception of Math, CLS does not have any other traditional subject-based classes like English or Science. Teachers meet in interdisciplinary teams to plan challenging, meaningful, and interesting community-driven project opportunities, and students spend most of their day engaged in interdisciplinary project-based learning. 

In October 2024, CLS announced it had won the Highest Achievement Award from the Virginia Board of Education for the second year in a row. Schools that win this award not only demonstrate top performance in reading, math, and science, but also in closing achievement gaps and addressing absenteeism. Founding principal, Chad Ratliff, said of the award, “The success of Lab’s project-based, interdisciplinary, multiage, mastery learning, and teacher-[leadership] approach to schooling shows that meaningful innovation and change is not only possible but can thrive—even within the framework of traditional metrics of achievement.”

Another example is Wickliffe Progressive Elementary, a K-5 school in Columbus, Ohio. Though they expanded into a new building in 2020, Wickliffe has served families in Upper Arlington since the 1970s emphasizing progressive education and multi-age learning. Like other progressive schools, they create learning spaces, schedules, and academics around a set of whole-child principles, which they have painted on the wall in their largest common space:

“While the progressive programs have adapted to changing state and national standards, we remain committed to the Ten Foundational Principles. 

We believe schools are essential to a democratic society.

Therefore,
We create a community for teaching and learning for all ages.

We raise social consciousness by encouraging the school community to examine and act upon complex issues within a democratic society.

We respect diversity among children and variation in their development.

We collaborate with colleagues and parents as co-educators to meet children’s needs.

We engage in thematic studies and foster authentic and emergent learning experiences.

We structure experiences that actively engage children in the process of learning and guide child choice and decision-making.

We design opportunities to integrate the arts in curriculum as an essential way to acquire and express knowledge.

We use time and space in a flexible manner.

We facilitate ongoing reflection and self-evaluation by children and adults.

We use learning groups and documentation to support and deepen learning.”

Launched in 2024, Third Coast Learning Collaborative (TCLC) is a US Department of Education grant-funded in Western Michigan partnering middle schools with non-profit organizations to implement a progressive education model. Working with a team of evaluators from the University of Virginia, TCLC seeks to show higher engagement in school, have better relationships with teachers and peers, experience greater academic achievement, improved psychological well-being, reduced absenteeism, and fewer behavioral and emotional problems compared to students in traditional middle school models.