By Isabella Bulone
Imagine looking into the courtyard of the LREI upper lobby: fourteen high school students sit in the courtyard looking up with anticipation and excitement. All of a sudden a contraption of paper and tape falls from the sky, an egg flies out and splatters on the ground. The students start yelling, laughing and pointing at the failed contraption. One student emerges from the crowd to pick up what is left of their project. The physics teacher continues dropping one contraption after the other from the third floor balcony while students film each drop and jump around every time another egg hits the floor. This is not chaos–it’s the Advanced Physics class’s egg drop lab.
Later the class will discuss what worked and what didn’t and will be tested on the forces involved in the lab. The process of exploring, investigating and reflecting on the lab to make sense of what happens during the lab is progressive education in a nutshell.
There is no single definition of what progressive education is, and it can look different in different classrooms. Math teacher Manjula Nair thinks that “progressive teaching and progressive education looks like students having conversations about math, using understandings from their previous experiences as well as using experiences that they’ve had,” she explains. “You all come in with different knowledge and different strengths and different weaknesses and we try to take the knowledge that you have and help you expand on it.”
Progressive education differs from traditional education because the styles of teaching are very different. Most traditional classrooms have a teacher at the head of the classroom telling students what is right and what is wrong, telling them how they should think about something and rely on textbooks or memorization. In progressive education, the desks don’t face the board and the teacher, but rather are grouped up so students can have discussions with one another about the material. The teacher does not tell the students what ideas are right or wrong but instead encourages them to push themselves to truly understand the concepts at hand.
But how do we know that the progressive method of teaching actually works? According to Kelly O’Shea, a physics teacher at LREI, progressive teaching is truly effective. “There is a research based physics test of conceptual understanding.” explained O’Shea. It has thirty multiple choice questions that are based off of one on one interviews with students. Most physics teachers and professors believe that after taking their class, students will have a solid understanding of physics. In traditional classrooms, lecture style classrooms, the first time the class takes the test the class average is about 30% and by the end of the year only increases to 40%. In a guided inquiry pedagogy, or progressive classroom, the first time the class takes the test the average is 50%-55%. By the end of the year the class average usually increases to 65%-70% showing the students are emerging Newtonian thinkers.
Although research from this test shows that students understand the material better in progressive classrooms, according to LREI students, progressive teaching can often leave students confused.
Senior Benjamin Maltz explained how he’s felt about his math and science classes. “Progressive teaching leaves many classes disorganized and many students disoriented, with the few who understand charging ahead and the few who don’t left behind, struggling to keep up.” However, Nair and O’Shea don’t see this confusion or struggle as a bad thing. “If you are confused you know something,” Nair said alluding to the idea that confusion is truly part of learning. “The first time you do something you’re not going to do it perfectly.”
In other words: part of learning is being confused, mulling it over and trying to make sense of what you are learning. O’Shea modeled her curriculum around encouraging students to make sense of physics. “[My style of teaching focuses] on student discourse and students talking to each other to solve problems and sense-making rather than answer-making,” O’Shea explained.
Not giving direct answers or refusing to give students the right answer can sometimes make students feel like their teachers aren’t teaching, but to Nair it is a way of helping students develop skills other than math skills. “If you’re always looking for an authority to tell you if you’re right or wrong, then outside these walls are you always going to look for somebody else to tell you if what you’re doing is right or wrong? But in your lives nobody’s going to say, ‘Here’s a project. Get it done. I’ll let you know if you were right or wrong, every step of the way,’” Nair explained.
Allowing students to use each other as resources to figure out problems is part of the sense- making process, but sometimes this can be perceived by students as teachers not teaching the subject. “Well sometimes I just don’t feel like I’m being taught by the teacher,” said senior Milo Romaguera “I feel that the teacher just tells the students to teach each other and themselves.”
Nair and O’Shea acknowledge that this is a concern for students, but also believe that this element of progressive teaching is essential to the goal of the curriculum revolving around the students instead of the teachers. This idea of students teaching themselves highlights the differences in perspectives around progressive teaching. Some students see it as a struggle and burden to work through problems while only relying on their peers, while teachers see it as making students truly work through problems to understand it on their own without relying on an authority figure to help them through every step of the way.
O’Shea is not oblivious to these statements about progressive teachers not truly teaching, but her experiences have shown that her presence in a classroom is more helpful than some students might think. “I could go back to the [research-based physics test of conceptual understanding] because when I was leaving the boarding school I was at I let my students just run their classes when I was going on interviews, and [they would] take pictures of their white boards and send it to me. You could see the [scores on the test when] I had missed a day [were lower than when I was there].” explained O’Shea. “It might seem like I’m not doing much, but obviously I must be because when I am there they understand it and when I’m not there their understanding isn’t as strong.”
O’Shea and Nair acknowledge that progressive education and teaching is not perfect, but the hardest part of teaching progressively is showing that it works. “People have to believe that it works and that’s really hard especially when it’s a lot more work for students and it’s a lot more work for teachers to teach this way,” Nair said.
Progressive education in science and math is not what people are accustomed to as the norm of teaching and it can be difficult to adapt to that style of teaching. According to O’Shea students at LREI must open their minds to progressive education and drop comparisons between progressive education and traditional education for progressive teaching and education to truly be effective. “It’s not what people expect in kind of the cultural idea of what school is like, so having to kind of confront people’s expectations of what a math or science class could be like could be a challenge too, because while [students] are confronting those expectation it makes it harder for them to be learning.”