Harkness Skills

In my last post, I described the philosophy behind the Harkness Table. It was clear from watching classes at Annie Wright that the students knew this philosophy and were consciously trying to enact these principles in their conversation. To describe a Harkness Table in action:

The conversation is almost 100% student driven. The teacher sits at the table with the students, asking an occasional question but mostly just observing and making notes. During the conversation I observed, the teacher was 100% un-bothered by moments of silence, some of them lasting longer than I usually allow. When a moment of disagreement verging on confusion emerged during the conversation, the teacher sat right through it, obviously paying attention but not jumping in to clarify. It was also very striking that the students in this class almost never volunteered a comment without referring to the text to support their contribution. I will sometimes let my students refer to Lord of the Rings or Oprah if they appear to be making a genuine attempt to illuminate a relevant idea. In this class, that never happened. Every comment included textual support:

"On page 71, column B," the author says..." or
"Going back to Mariah's comment about p. 68."

The students actually talked like this. Students were also trained in structuring their conversation.

"Adding on to what Michelle said..".
"The passage on p. 70 confused me because..."
"I think the importance of Cathy's point is also shown on pg. 68"
"I actually disagree. I think the real reason is on p. 72."
"I think we may have skipped over something." (Student adds point.)
"I think we might be getting off-track. X happened for a lot of reasons." (Student then summarized the conversation so far.)

Students actually said all of these things.

After 30-35 minutes of this, the teacher stepped in and asked the students to summarize the conversation: what were the major themes and ideas? It was at this point that he clarified the confusion that had emerged 10-15 minutes earlier in the discussion. He then asked the students to evaluate the conversation: what grade would you award yourselves and why? When one of them suggested a B+, he disagreed, pointing out that three students had not said a word during the class. One student pushed back and said that although some were silent, most had done a good job of "always digging deeper" in the text. It was clear that all the students would all get the same grade for the conversation. This self-evaluation was the end of class.

I will end by adding a list of the skills that the Harkness method wants every student to exercise in class. Some of these are quite self-explanatory, but students might need to be explicitly taught language for some of these things:

• organizing, leading the conversation
  
• summarizing, re-stating or clarifying the text
• citing specific quotations or passages from the text
• asking a question about the text
• commenting on the text, giving an opinion or reaction
• making a suggestion about the text or discussion
• summarizing discussion up to that point
• analyzing text or a comment or the whole conversation up to that point
• reacting to comments
• answering comments
• re-starting discussion
• filling in a gap
• arguing a point, disagreeing
• asking for new information
• asking for other comments, reactions
• comparing to other works

It was very striking to me how rooted in the text this work is. There was absolutely a culture of "Where's your proof?" "Where do you see this?" "Find it in the text." However, reading assignments are significantly shorter than reading assignments I typically give. For example, in one class I observed, students had been asked to read from p. 64-71; in another p. 1-10 and p. 17-20.