Tenets of Summers-Knoll Progressive Education

Summers-Knoll is a progressive school serving gifted, bright, and creative children. The term “progressive” refers to a philosophy of education that originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the work of pioneering educators such as John Dewey (who was faculty at the University of Michigan before moving to Chicago) and A.S. Neill (founder of the Summerhill School in England). While progressive philosophy can take many forms, there are particular anchors that unite the different branches of progressive educational practice.

A progressive school is one that attends to the whole child; academics are furthered by the social, emotional, physical, and cultural development that will give them the stamina, skills and ethical framework to live life deeply. A true progressive education engages the students as stakeholders in authentic learning experiences, and involves them in experiential learning - learning by doing, rather than by memorizing and repeating. It recognizes that children have individual needs in the way they learn, and they learn not only from their teachers but from each other and from partners in the wider community.

Over the years, some of the language of progressive education such as “educating the whole child” or “joyful learning” has been more broadly adopted by educators. But a true progressive education remains fundamentally different than that of most schools. At Summers-Knoll, our approach is guided by the following principles:

1. We educate the whole child
2. We see, understand, and respond to each child as an individual
3. We cultivate each child’s inherent love of learning
4. We create engaging, hands-on learning experiences
5. We build higher-order thinking skills of questioning, analysis, synthesis and evaluation
6. We provide a responsive, academically vigorous and thematically integrated curriculum
7. We support creative thinking and academic progress through integration of the arts
8. We create an environment in which students are comfortable taking risks
9. We actively teach community-building skills and concepts that foster collaboration, inclusion, and service to others
10. We engage children in decision-making and encourage them to take an active role in their learning experience.