Harkness Education

Like most of us, my early educational years were marked by a teacher-centered form of schooling.  The teacher stood in the front of the room and presented; the rest of us sat in rows and absorbed.  It wasn't until I reached high school that I experienced anything different, and then it occurred so seamlessly that I didn't even realize that I was the beneficiary of a revolutionary approach to education. 

I spent my high school years at the Northfield School, a  New England boarding school for girls (today it's the co-ed Northfield Mount Hermon School).  My father, a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, another New England boarding school (and also co-ed now, although not in his, or my, day), had scoured the countryside in search of a girls' equivalent to Exeter and had been told repeatedly, "Northfield is the place."  I selected Northfield for other reasons entirely, not having any idea why he was so satisfied with the choice.  And it wasn't until a few years ago, when I read about a Harkness seminar that one of my daughter's teachers had attended, that I realized why.

The education offered by Exeter takes place largely around oval tables, the originals the gifts of one Edward Harkness.  Students spend their classes seated around those tables, largely in student-led discussions,  guided by the occasional teacher prompt or suggestion.  That was high school as I knew it -- although we didn't have the elegant Harkness tables, we did follow the model of the seating arrangement and discussion, at least in the humanities.  (I understand that math and science classes have moved increasingly closer to the Harkness method over the decades.)  In the article that I read, the author noted that the teacher began class by walking into the room, tossing his copy of a Shakespeare play onto the table, and asking, "Okay, what did you guys think?"  The students took it from there.

When it came time for our own children to go to school, my husband and I chose a Montessori education for them that lasted from preschool through 8th grade.  Still knowing nothing about the Harkness method in any official or articulated way, I naturally gravitated toward a school in which the children were responsible for their own learning, in which the adults create the climate and space and then get out of the way.  My daughter and I were discussing this topic last night, and I said something about my surprise when her high school had turned out to be deeply traditional in its approach to education, with much lecturing and teacher-directed learning going on. I reminded her about having read that her freshman English teacher had gone to a Harkness seminar, which her school had seen as something of a novel approach.  She acknowledged that she had been surprised, too, by how much more responsibility she and her peers had had for their own learning when they were in middle school than they later had in high school.

The topic came up last night because I had spent the day at a teacher workshop on the topic of better incorporating writing into our social studies classes.  The school in which I work provides some immensely creative teaching, and the workshop was both inspiring and of practical value.  But I was bothered by the emphasis on a  "hook" -- the idea that we should open each class with something designed to grab the attention of our students and focus the lesson for them.  Pursuant to that approach, each class is designed to become a mini-masterpiece of a drama created by the teacher, rather than an exploration initiated and pursued on the basis of student curiosity.  The idea of tossing a book on a table and asking the students, "So, what did you think?" is viewed as carelessness rather than as the fostering of student discipline and rigor.

It can be fun to create those "hooks."  I was working on lessons about the Scientific Revolution in Europe yesterday, and I got a kick out of looking for Ptolemaic and heliocentric maps of the universe, and finding a little cartoon depicting Galileo's run-in with the church.  But in the Harkness-Northfield-Montessori line of schooling that forms the basis for my own educational philosophy, the students should have the pleasure of making those discoveries on their own.

Yes, it takes longer.  Sometimes much, much longer.  It's certainly easier and speedier for a teacher to present a lecture on the concepts of metaphor and simile than it is for her to ask casually, "So, 'All the world's a stage' -- what does that mean?"  and leave it to the students to derive an understanding of the both the passage and the literary device.  But at the end of the day, who grasps better what a metaphor is -- the student who memorized a definition and example, or the student who figured it out for herself and went on to search delightedly for more of them?