Green Acres School

At Green Acres, educators and parents care deeply about both what and how students learn. Teachers spark students’ interests—encouraging them to think, to imagine, to ask questions, to experiment, to explore, to create, and to solve problems. Children’s learning thus is authentic because it relates to students’ own experiences and to the real world.

A cornerstone of the progressive philosophy of education, authentic learning requires a great deal of effort in development and implementation of curriculum, and in our interactions with students. It also requires that teachers be purposeful and flexible—ready to modify a lesson plan because students’ interests require an unexpected exploration but also quite clear about the goals of any given assignment or class project. Authentic learning demands collaboration among teachers to integrate the curriculum, providing students with opportunities to gain additional perspective and understanding of a topic across multiple disciplines. As Ted Sizer, the contemporary thinker most associated with progressive education, once argued, “Little of value can ever be truly understood through the lens of one subject alone.” For the issues facing our world today, whether it is war, climate change, or poverty, we know this to be true. Authentic learning also requires continuous professional development in content and classroom strategies, because it is much more difficult to plan a compelling, meaningful learning opportunity than to simply share information. In short, providing authentic learning experiences to students requires a very intentional program.

Green Acres’ “intentional model” of progressive education employs strategies and concepts supported by research. It demands a focus on child development, engaging and challenging learning experiences, opportunities for students to reflect on their learning, and a nurturing environment. Supported not only by the established ideas of John Dewey and Jean Piaget, but also by the best current research, Green Acres’ program balances children’s social, emotional, physical, and creative development with intellectual challenge, in an accepting and exciting atmosphere that encourages respect for others and a love for learning.

Authentic learning experiences at Green Acres are designed to help students develop habits that yield success in the wider world. Ted Sizer argued that schools should “nurture good habits,” as it is “people’s habits that we most value and respect.” Schooling therefore becomes less about teaching isolated skills and much more about “pushing out into the world young citizens who are soaked in habits of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness, joy and commitment.” Teachers must ensure that children read and write effectively, are proficient mathematicians and scientists, and have opportunities to develop athletic and artistic talents and social skills. Yet this is only the beginning. Green Acres teachers also must work to broaden students’ experiences and thinking. They know that what makes someone successful often has more to do with their openness to new ideas—their curiosity and thirst for understanding—than with the specific knowledge that they carry.

Research and thinking about authentic teaching finally have caught up with Green Acres’ longstanding philosophy and practices. This is seen in the recent and popular writings by Daniel Pink and Thomas Friedman, and in broadly subscribed educational initiatives such as the Partnership for 21st Century Learning. In developing a vision for what “students should master to succeed in work and life in the 21st Century,” this organization listed the very skills (or habits) Sizer described: creativity and innovation; critical thinking and problem solving; communication and collaboration; productivity and accountability; initiative and self-direction; flexibility and adaptability; social and cross-cultural skill; and leadership and responsibility. In another testament to this seismic shift in thinking about the purpose of schooling, the Council for Aid to Education recently developed the “College and Work Readiness Assessment.” Not surprisingly, it measures high school students’ abilities to think critically, to reason analytically, to solve problems, and to write well. As their materials suggest, there is nothing wrong with teaching to a test if the test measures the kinds of habits and skills that we know will have the most value in college and beyond. Even the U.S. Department of Education has eschewed traditional testing it supported in the past, recognizing that an assessment of learning should evaluate more than a student’s ability to memorize and compute. In April 2010, the Department initiated a contest to design an assessment method that will elicit “complex student demonstrations of applications” of learning—in other words, to show what one can do rather simply than what one knows. This is the essence of authentic learning.

What is school like when teachers understand the ways children learn? At Green Acres, we always have emphasized problem solving over strict memorization, active over passive learning, and creativity and imagination over recitation. Sixth graders, for example, who take the initiative to propose and carry out a clothing drive, learn more about writing, public speaking, teamwork, empathy, and citizenship than if their project had been solely designed by their teachers. Second graders learn to analyze what they read and to make group decisions by designing their own questions for their literature groups. As students plan ways to reduce the School’s carbon footprint, work in groups to design a hovercraft, devise and implement a plan to serve a need in the community, present a multidisciplinary performance for parents or a lesson on the history of race relations for their peers, they are having authentic experiences—practicing the very habits one would hope to see in an adult workplace, book group, or other endeavor.

As progressive educators, we focus on creating as many authentic learning experiences as possible for students—experiences that encourage them to think critically, to work collaboratively, and to produce school work that is meaningful to them and that often has value beyond school. In doing so, they not only build confidence, but begin to see themselves as connected to a larger world, where their ideas and efforts matter.