Trowel or spoon for screening at a 1700s farm site in Virginia?

I've been volunteering on a dig outside Fredericksburg for about 6 weeks now and I keep getting into this argument with the site lead about screening tools. She swears by the flat trowel for pushing dirt through the quarter inch mesh, but I picked up a metal spoon after week 2 and honestly my find rate went way up, I pulled out 11 bits of ceramic and a pipe stem in one afternoon. The trowel just scrapes everything into a clump and I feel like I'm missing small stuff, but she says the spoon slows the line down too much. We're mostly working a plow zone so it's all mixed up anyway, which might be why the spoon works for me. Has anyone else switched tools mid-dig and actually tracked whether it mattered, or is this just me being stubborn?