The Harkness Method is a radically democratic teaching method premised on equality, collaboration, and open-ended discussion. Here are a few things I've learned about Harkness Discussions in my 20+ years of teaching....
I. What is the Harkness Method?
In a traditional classroom, the teacher stands at a podium in the front of the room and disseminates knowledge to students who sit at desks organized in rows. The teacher delivers lectures full of information that the students are expected to internalize and then reproduce in tests or writing assignments. Students are framed as the passive recipients of such knowledge; and they quickly learn that their role is to memorize and faithfully regurgitate the information deemed important by the teacher.
But in a Harkness classroom, the podium and desks are replaced by a circular table where teacher and students can sit together. How did a seemingly simple change in architecture end up revolutionizing the dynamics in the classroom? How did it transform the student learning experience?
At a Harkness table, the students sit at a common table — signaling that they share a common purpose. The chairs are arranged in a circle, making it possible for all students to see, speak to, and learn from one another. As a result, students learn to become active agents in knowledge production; and they experience learning as participatory and student-centered. They begin to realize that the success of every class session depends upon the thoughtful contributions of every person at the table.
Moreover, the vertical hierarchy of the classroom is radically overturned. The students are no longer encouraged to train their eyes and ears on a single source of authority. Nor are the students sorted into front-row seats and back-row seats. Instead, every seat at the table is of equal importance. As a result, every student is affirmed as having a voice at the table — and all voices are equal. The experience of learning becomes radically democratic and deeply collaborative.
II. Harkness Discussions vs. Socratic Seminars
How does a Harkness Discussion differ from a Socratic Seminar? Although the two terms are often used as synonyms, there are important differences between these two teaching methods!
In a Socratic Seminar, the teacher poses a series of questions and then calls upon certain students to answer those questions. Ideally, the teacher’s questions help students to think critically and to continually revise their ideas and beliefs. However, the teacher maintains complete control over which topics and content get addressed; and the answers to the teacher's questions are usually predetermined by the teacher, whose line of questioning might run the risk of making students feel dumb or inferior.
In a Harkness Discussion, it is the students who bring many of the questions to the table, who respond to one another's questions thoughtfully, and who determine what content ends up getting addressed in class. To be sure, the teacher plays a vital in the proceedings — but she no longer determines the direction that any given class session will take. Instead, the teacher's role is to help students think more deeply about the topics and passages that are most interesting to them! Far from having all the answers, the teacher gets to join the students in being a learner engaged in the project of shared knowledge production. And the students get to witness the teacher having “a-ha” moments as she embraces the opportunity to learn alongside them!
III. The Benefits of Harkness Discussions
What, then, are the benefits of adopting the Harkness Method? Here are some of the ways in which I've seen Harkness Discussions transform the dynamics in my own classroom:
• Responsibility: The Harkness Method helps to collectivize responsibility in the classroom. Students become responsible to one another for arriving prepared and contributing actively. They're not completing their homework to impress the teacher; rather, they're doing it out of a shared sense of responsibility one another.
• Collaboration: Students no longer perceive the teacher as the primary source of knowledge in the classroom. Instead, they approach their classmates as vital resources for their own learning!
• Inquiry: Instead of trying to impress the teacher with what they already know, students become curious about what they don’t yet know, and they begin to embrace the interrogative mode as the royal road to new knowledge. They enter the classroom eager to explore what remains puzzling or challenging about the course content; they formulate interpretive questions that open up new and highly productive avenues for shared inquiry; and they learn to tolerate ambiguity while ideas are being sorted and refined. Thus, the Harkness Method prevents students from arriving at premature certainties, replacing closure with breadth and depth. That's why I view it as the highest form of inquiry-based instruction!
• Higher-order thinking: The opportunity to think collaboratively pushes students to refine their thinking in ways that would be hard for any individual participant to accomplish alone. Students begin to build upon one another's ideas, adding nuance, introducing qualifications, and arriving at more complex understandings of the topics at hand.
• Cognitive flexibility: Students become attached to the thrill of having their minds stretched and changed by a thought-provoking discussions. If their minds haven’t changed by the end of a class, what was the point?
That's a lot of benefits!
IV. The Drawbacks of Using Harkness
Any honest practitioner will acknowledge that embracing the Harkness Method does force teachers to give up certain things. Here's my sense of what a Harkness teacher risks losing or giving up:
• Control: The teacher is not the sole authority to whom all students defer. The teacher does not steer the direction of the class or determine who speaks.
• Efficiency: The class may not move through the content in the most logical or efficient manner. Instead, the sequencing of the topics that get addressed is determined largely by the students' interests.
• Rigor: The person with specialized expertise about the content is no longer disseminating knowledge and ensuring that the most important points receive the most attention.
As a young teacher, I'll admit that I spent a lot of time worrying about the first of these issues. It felt scary to give up some of my control over the classroom. But now I find this loss of control to be nothing short of thrilling! The fact that I never know what we'll end up talking about in a given class is incredibly exciting — for it means that every class offers a new opportunity to deepen my knowledge of a literary text.
What I do still worry about is rigor. How can teachers facilitate discussions that are open-ended and student-driven without compromising on intellectual rigor? This is a question that I think about all the time! As some of you may know, I've devoted the last ten years to developing higher-order discussion questions that foster critical thinking and constructive collaboration. My discussion questions for books like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Frankenstein, The Crucible, The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Raisin in the Sun, Maus, and Persepolis can be found in my TPT shop.
V. How to Get There: Strategies for Shifting to Harkness
If you're interested in adopting the Harkness Method, here are a few tips for getting started. Begin by telling students that your next class session will be an open-ended discussion driven by whatever the student find interesting about the text. Require every student to prepare by reading and annotating the next chapter of their book — and by writing down two interpretive questions that they'd be willing share with the class. Before the students arrive in the classroom, make sure that you've arranged the desks in a circle. Then ask one student to get the discussion started by reading their question in a loud, clear voice.
Try to let the students’ interests drive the content and shape of the discussion: where to begin, where to go next, etc. Because you're accustomed to conducting this orchestra, you'll inevitably be tempted to jump in after almost every student comment. But force yourself to practice "strategic withholding." Instead of supplying students with answers, allow students to grapple with one another's questions and to experience a degree of confusion. In fact, you might even want to remove yourself from the circle: to stand back and watch from the wall, or to be the scribe who tracks the discussion in silence. Once they perceive that you're not going to help them when they're confused, they'll begin to embrace the opportunity to collaborate with one another and become active learners.
During your first Harkness Discussion, you might tell students that they're allowed to keep raising their hands. But they should do so not as a request to be called upon by the teacher but rather as a signal to their peers that they have something to say. Then, in your second or third discussion, you could announce, “Let’s do this hands-down…” If your students are totally new to this mode of engagement, you might need to circulate behind students' desks in order to ensure that everyone stays focused and on task. But instead of interrupting the discussion itself, try to use non-invasive techniques like hand signals or eye contact to re-direct anyone who's disengaged.
VI. Virtuosic Teacher Moves
If a teacher is no longer leading the class, what are they doing?
Great question! When I facilitate a Harkness Discussion, I try to participate in the same way that my student do: asking one or two interpretive questions, building on the insights of other participants, making sure that the contributions of quieter students don't get dropped, and occasionally modeling respectful ways to disagree or puncture groupthink. But here are a few other things that a Harkness teacher might do....
In moments of silence, the teacher might ask the students whether they'd like some more time to think Whenever I do this, I try to use the collective pronoun "we," like this: "Are we still wrestling with the passage just mentioned, or are we ready to take up a new passage or question?" Or else: “Did we take that topic as far as it could go? Are we ready to move on? Who'd like to put a new question on the table?”
Another thing that a great Harkness teacher will do is pause the discussion to praise a student who has exhibited an especially impressive participation behaviors. For example: "Alex just did an amazing job of responding to Rhonda by name, affirming what was helpful about her comment, and then building on the comment by supporting it with additional textual evidence. Bravo!" Or: "Julia just did a phenomenal job of making a connection between two different passages in the text, then using the connection to formulate an original question about why the author might establish a parallel between those two scenes. Impressive work! Now, who wants to take a shot at answering her question?" Not only do such comments help to codify certain participation behaviors for the entire class, but they incentivize other students to experiment with contributing in similar ways.
Here are a few more things that a Harkness teacher can do:
• Offer intermittent summaries of the content of a discussion
• Ask clarifying questions; or probe for more nuance
• Identify contradictions or subtle disagreements
• Create space for quiet students.
• Correct any factual errors
VII. Looking Ahead
I plan to write another blog entry with strategies for how to assess student participation in Harkness Discussions. In the meantime, I'd be thrilled to hear your thoughts about the Harkness Method! What strategies have you used to generate rigorous and engaging discussion? How have you modified the Harkness Method to make it effective for the student population at your school? What's the best discussion you've ever had?