The Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center had the pleasure of hosting researcher Dr. Luke Steller for an immersive school-day visit in September 2025. A science communicator and community engagement leader from Australia’s Northern Territory, Dr. Steller was exploring how STEM education can be strengthened through authentic collaboration with local communities as a Winston Churchill Fellow. His visit to Hanahau‘oli School was one of 19 program visits across Hawaiʻi, Arizona, New York City and London, and his observations and unique insights into opportunities for empowering STEM education in Australia are published in a comprehensive and inspirational report that can be downloaded and viewed in its entirety here.
Championing Equity and Advocacy: Announcing the Newest Hawai‘i Social Justice Educator Award Recipients
The Social Justice Education in Hawai‘i Project is a Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center initiative led in partnership with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa College of Education. Since 2018, the project has been growing and supporting local educators who see schools as levers of change for creating a better future world. . Deeply aligned to the mission of progressive schools, social justice educators seek to transform education from merely transferring knowledge to actively promoting equity, fairness, and more inclusive, democratic societies.
Dr. Noboru Tanaka on Progressive Education and the Japanese National Curriculum
I first met Dr. Noboru Tanaka in 2015, while traveling across Japan giving a series of lectures related to democracy and education. Since then, we’ve become friends and colleagues, collaborating on a number of scholarly endeavors that aim to bridge the work of progressive educators in Hawai‘i and Japan. Not only has this included co-authoring academic journals and book chapters, but also cheering side-by-side at my children’s high school football games and learning more about Tanaka’s love of motorcycle riding and stint in a punk rock band. Today, I continue to work with Dr. Tanaka in his role as an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Human Development and Environment at Kobe University, where he specializes in citizenship education and democratic society studies. His research, similar to mine, focuses on education for democratic citizenship, with his lab exploring civic engagement and educational philosophy.
HA No Dis, All Ability
One of the greatest honors of my life has been learning, growing, and teaching at the only public high school on the rural and very Hawaiian Island of Molokai. Located in Hoolehua, Molokai High School has a predominantly Native Hawaiian student body, with approximately 76.5% identifying as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. As a non-Native Hawaiian, it has been very special to learn from the Molokai High School community; how Hawaiian cultural values can be used in my work as a special educator who aims to foster a holistic, safe, and supportive learning environment for our entire school community.
Noreen Varney, A Future City Unit & Lessons Learned About The Values that Guide Us in Progressive Education
My name is Gillian Wood, and I am one of the 6th grade teachers at Hanahauʻoli School. In November of last year, my co-teacher at the time, Noreen Varney, died suddenly. She was a true progressive educator, and I feel profoundly grateful not only to have worked alongside her, but to have learned with and from her. Each school day, I experienced the joy, creativity, and the possibility this model of education can bring to life. Over time, I came to believe that this is how learning should feel for everyone: both teacher and student alike.
Supporting Student and Faculty Well-Being and Belonging: A Campus Sensory Room
Environments shape how we think, feel, and engage more than we may realize. Have you ever walked into a space that instantly made you feel overwhelmed? Sensory regulation, or the brain’s ability to process, organize, and respond to sensory input, is essential to learning, attention, and emotional well-being. When our sensory needs are unmet, we may struggle to focus, manage stress, or feel comfortable in educational and social spaces. When those needs are supported, we are better positioned to thrive.
Digital Landscapes: The Languages of Technology in the Reggio Emilia Approach
We are Federica Gallone and Federica Lentini – two educators who feel most alive when we are learning with children. Our professional lives have unfolded in early childhood settings, where relationships, curiosity, and wonder shape our days. We have worked closely with children as teachers, atelierista, and pedagogista, accompanying students’ thinking through materials, dialogue, light, and documentation. Our classrooms and studios are spaces of research—places where questions remain open and children’s ideas are made visible, respected, and revisited.
It’s Not Just About Units and Projects, A Progressive Education Approach to Lesson Planning
A number of our authors have written about a progressive education approach to curriculum design over the years, but surprisingly, it is hard to find progressive education writers that focus on lesson planning. For example, in this post I give a brief introduction to the history of progressive education curriculum design, then highlight Hanahau‘oli School’s approach to developing “integrated, interdisciplinary, and thematic” units of study. In Gabby Holt’s blog about concept-based learning, she emphasizes unit planning and the ways progressive education units based on concepts rather than topics can cultivate and build students’ enduring understandings over time. Other bloggers, like Brett Peterson who published this incredible read, “Uncovering The Progressive Past: The Origins of PBL,” underscores the progressive education movement’s role in introducing educators “to a curriculum inspired by and designed with the project,” also known as project-based learning (PBL). In each of these pieces, it is clear that the progressive education tradition favors longer-term units of study or projects as the foundation for curriculum design, rather than shorter lessons or discrete lesson planning.
A Refreshed Mission: Hanahau‘oli School is a Leader in Progressive Education with Roots in Hawai‘i
In August 2025, Hanahau‘oli School shared a refreshed Mission Statement and a thoughtfully articulated framework of Guiding Beliefs—the result of a reflective and collaborative process involving voices from across the school community. While grounded in the values, philosophy, and traditions that have guided Hanahau‘oli since 1918, this renewed mission looks ahead with hope and intention. It embraces the changing world children live in today—and the one they will help to create—with a spirit of joyful wonder and purpose.
Education and AI: Four Steps for Navigating This and Every Wave of Educational Evolution Driven by Technological Innovation
The constant onslaught of new innovations within Artificial Intelligence (AI) - specifically Generative AI (GenAI) - and the expansive impact AI has had on the workforce and economy, can feel overwhelming. Everything and everyone appears to be rushing towards AI (Giattino et al., 2023), for the same reason Jeff Bezos ran to the field of digital commerce (Locke, 2020), and now, our economy reflects and has become dependent on AI’s growth (Sigalos, 2025). Naturally, education has followed this influx towards AI with individuals and institutions racing to be on the front end of the innovation adoption curve (“Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve,” n.d.), either for the benefit of human development, building capital, or both. From my perspective, this is not a fad. Education is an ecosystem mostly bound by time constraints of a school year, school day, class periods, etc... And in time-bound ecosystems, speed wins. Just like with any technological innovation, AI makes processes or products happen faster, which is of value in a capitalist economy. As a result, I believe we are in the midst of our next evolution in education with the rise of AI. To borrow from the metaphor of surfing– educational stakeholders can either miss it, get crushed by it, or paddle, catch, and safely ride the wave. In fact, we might even find ways to face our fears head on and enjoy riding the waves of this upcoming swell of educational evolution driven by technological innovation.
Reflections on the Reasons Why Our Commitment to Equity and Anti-Bias Education for Young Children Remains Strong
On Thursday, September 11 and Friday, September 12, 2025 the Hanahau’oli School Professional Development Center hosted a two day workshop titled, A Commitment to Equity: Connecting the Nā Hopena A‘o Framework to Anti-Bias Early Childhood Education. In past years, this workshop has sold out within weeks of registration opening, but this time around educators were slow to sign up and the number of attendees was comparatively smaller to previous offerings of this program.
John Dewey’s Progressive Education Philosophy
Every two years I am invited to Hanahau’oli’s Kulā'iwi (multiage grades 2-3) classroom to support the students in learning more about the school’s history, progressive education philosophy, and the reasons why having a philosophy is critical to the school’s mission. This is a part of their “School Unit,” which is designed to teach the following key concepts, essential questions and instructional learner outcomes.
The Power of the Expressive Arts in Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Work with Children
“Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else.” – Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
This quote from the influential American educator Sydney Gurewitz Clemens speaks to what I see as the power of the use of the arts in educating children and adolescents. Whether it’s through the drawing out of their ideas, the enactment of characters in a student-created play to demonstrate learning, or the creation of poetry around their observations of the natural world, the arts allow each student to communicate their thinking through creative products that are unique to that individual. Additionally, when an individual student’s creative products are viewed and witnessed by others, it not only helps to deepen connections to learning content, but also between the individual artist-creator and their peers and teacher.
Cultivating “Mitori:” Reflections from a Progressive Education Exchange Between Japan and Hawai‘i
Located in Fukui Prefecture, “The Happiest Prefecture in Japan” (Japan Research Institute, 2024) and noted as providing high quality of education (MEXT, 2021, Sony Life, 2022), the University of Fukui is one of four flagship teacher training universities designated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT, 2022). We believe part of that result is from a strong focus on community and education throughout Fukui.
Democracy Has to Be Born Anew Every Generation, and Education Is Its Midwife
We have taken on a new venture at the Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center–printing apparel with hallmark progressive education quotes meant to inspire and spread the message of the ongoing progressive education movement. Characterized by a distinct philosophy and practice that emphasizes experiential, child-centered, and hands-on learning, progressive education at its core is also dedicated to ensuring the future of our democracy. It is for this reason that we selected this quote from John Dewey (1916) to print on our inaugural line of t-shirts: Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife” (p. 138 - 139).
The Progressive Educator Abroad: Holding Onto My “Why”
I write this blog to you from my current home in Shanghai, China. In 2022, I made the leap from the safety of my tenured teaching position at a public charter school in Honolulu to the unpredictable world of international education. One two-year contract at a time–in order to see more of the world and grow as a person and educator–I am still teaching abroad. Over the past three years, I’ve taught in international schools in South Korea and China, and I hope to continue this journey in Europe someday.
“Developmentally Appropriate Yet Sophisticated”: Foundations of Concept-Based Curriculum & Instruction
As we continually explore the question of what it means to be a progressive educator, one of the answers we consistently return to is the idea that progressive education instills within the child a lifelong love of learning. John Dewey made this clear (and a central part of his text Experience and Education) when he wrote, “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of the desire to go on learning” (p. 20). In progressive spaces, we ensure this in many ways - by facilitating hands-on, student guided learning; by following children' s lead in the classroom, and, as Julie Stern writes in her text Conceptual Understanding: Harnessing Natural Curiosity for Learning that Transfers, by “respect[ing] the developmental stages of childhood with intellectual rigor” (p. 4).
Junior Kindergarten Insect Unit: Insects, Spiders, and Bugs, Oh My!
It was restaurant day, a culmination of our eateries unit, which explored how an eatery works, the importance of eateries, roles and responsibilities in eateries, and how eateries help the community. Children collaborated in small groups, demonstrating their learning about how an eatery functions and how to work as a team. Amongst the groups was the “Mexican Burrito Restaurant” team. They were working in our outside garden space, and while they were highly engaged in the task at hand, they also kept getting “distracted,” as most children their age do. The head chef in this group was crafting beautiful tacos using leaves as a shell and flowers as her filling. Another child was taking pride in the restaurant’s money box he had created in our Idea Box Center, where recycled materials are used for inventions. The pressure to film a final video to document their presentation of learning in this unit loomed over my head, but not theirs. As they continued to define roles and negotiate who would do each job in their restaurant, one of the students observed a small caterpillar munching on a leaf above their heads.
A Magnanimity of Spirit: Resiliency and Inner Development for Progressive Educators
It's back to school season. At this time of the year, educators and leaders are thinking about many things: materials to buy, curriculum to plan, classrooms to prepare. But what about our inner preparation as educators? I have found over the years, in my own work and in working with teachers around the world, that it's not what we've planned, but how we've prepared ourselves that will determine our success in the classroom.
For the Intellectual Commons: Electronic Scans of Original 1930s Progressive Education Association Conference Speeches and Evaluation Reports from the Eight-Year Study
To wrap up my Summer 2025 blog series featuring a number of speeches given at Progressive Education Association (PEA) annual meetings held in the late 1930s, I present complete electronic scans of the booklets to all who find mutual excitement and curiosity about learning from the progressive education movement’s history. For those of you who missed my first blog in this series, I stumbled upon the PEA booklets during a trip to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Hamilton Library. Nestled on the same shelf as another book I was looking for lay a stack of eight delicate publications titled, “PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION BOOKLET: PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION ASSOCIATION”.