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Hark! Here Cometh Another Educational Fad!
For years, I’ve donated to our school district’s educational foundation. I know my money goes towards funding scholarships, or buying technology like computers and 3D printers for the school labs.
So it was no surprise when I received my 2017 appeal letter from the foundation. The surprise was this year’s fundraising drive: $25,000 for tables. I thought our schools had a lot of those already, but apparently they’re not Harkness Tables, which are critical to implementing the pedagogically-progressive Harkness Method.
Do you know what the Harkness Method is? I didn’t, either. Here’s how our foundation describes it:
As you probably know, the “Sage-on-the-Stage” model of teaching, where knowledge is imparted mostly through lectures is morphing into a system by which students learn mostly from each other, through discussions and group projects. The role of the typical teacher is evolving into that of “The Guide on the Side”, directing the learning by encouraging students to be more active participants in classroom discussions, posing their own unique ideas and honing their presentation and team-building skills . . . Harkness Tables are designed to facilitate this style of learning at many of the top-rated schools around the country.
Okay. After reading that passage, I suddenly understood why my kids have been telling me that their classes have featured increasingly less formal instruction, more group projects and “breakout discussions” of 3-5 students. In fact, class participation is now a hefty part of their grades.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Requiring kids to volunteer their own take on a reading assignment, for instance, gets them to not only do the reading, but think about it as well. And the ability to listen and respond to others effectively is a good skill to learn.
Still, I see a lot of drawbacks to the Harkness Method.
Too much of it leads to insipid blather. For instance, my kids are taking US History and have not had a single lecture or talk all year. Every class has been comprised entirely of small-group discussion, usually centered upon reading. These are 15 and 16-year-olds, getting their first serious exposure to US History. Because their teacher never gives them a twenty-minute overview on, say, the trends leading to the Civil War, and because they are teens, the conversation tends towards the shallow end. Someone will offer a golden nugget like, “Wow. Slavery was really bad.” The rest will nod their heads gravely.
The windbags reign supreme. Everyone who’s ever had to operate in a group setting knows how this works. There’s always one person who tries to monopolize the conversation with their yapping. Sometimes there’s two, and they verbally go at it like Godzilla versus Mothra. Meanwhile, everyone else tries to squeeze in an observation or two in order to save their grade. For introverts like my son, this can be challenging. During English, while two young ladies talked over each other in manic fury, he kept checking the clock to see if he had time to make a comment before the bell rang. The teacher, however, thought he was checking the clock to see how much more Hell he had to endure. She gave him a low participation grade for not showing “respect” to his fellow students. At least my son learned a valuable lesson: It’s all about the optics.
Unless the instructor is really sharp, it’s like a vacation from teaching. From what I’ve gleaned from my kids and their friends, the Harkness method involves the teacher floating from small group to small group, sometimes interrupting to ask a pointed question, most of the time just listening. Okay. I guess that might work, if the questions actually guide discussion. But the cynic in me thinks: Hey! No lecture or talk to prepare! No in-class work to correct! Just take note of who’s talking and who isn’t. Easy-peasy.
My own kids prefer more of a balance between Harkness and traditional lecture. Non-stop small-group discussions, they say, lead to too much meandering and grand-standing.
As it turns out, they’re not alone. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy described her disillusionment with the Harkness Method in the Huffington Post. In her opinion, Harkness (used in every class at Exeter) emphasized the quantity of student commentary over the quality:
Instead of consulting my readings and collecting rare kernels of truth from my classmates in order to make a thoughtful comment when the time felt right, I started speaking whenever there was a momentary lull in the discussion, even if I had nothing to say. I learned to ask vague questions that allowed me to use my voice but often did little to advance my or my peers’ knowledge . . . At Exeter, I learned that what you said was more important than what you knew. I learned that the louder you are, the better you are. I learned that there’s only one way to learn anything, and that’s to talk in circles until someone takes notice.
Yeesh. On the bright side, this young lady has a promising career in PR . . . or politics.
But back to those Harkness Tables! You might be wondering why a table is so critical to the Harkness Method that my school district needs to drop around $25,000 on them. Well, I offer you this photo of a Harkness Table courtesy of Dr. Dimes, maker of “the only Harkness Table authorized by Phillips Exeter Academy”:
So obviously, they’re critical and far superior to any other large table because Harkness Tables are . . . oval? I mean, the pricier models have slide-out desks, but . . . really? The kids can’t arrange their desks in a circle or something?
Yeah, I think I’m holding onto my donation this year.
Published in General
Excellent point.
I see what you did there. ;)
On topic, I think this “method” is conflating the lecture and recitation sessions of a typical college course.
Pilli hit on it directly by saying:
Which is it exactly. In most decent college courses I attended, lectures were given two or three times a week by the actual professor, and recitations, nominally “led” by a TA and smaller in size than the 200+ students in a normal lecture hall, were where you asked questions and discussed the material until you were sure you understood it.
I’m fairly certain it is impossible for students to do the latter without the former, and I’m completely certain it is impossible for high school students to teach themselves anything in such an environment.
As our President would say: SAD!
Hey but don’t you know we aren’t paying enough and they always want more.
First we were told to look to the wisdom of the children. Now they’re going to teach themselves. Next, I suppose we’ll be taking required classes from them!
What could possibly go wrong?
Bwahahahahaaaa! Oh, that’s a huge improvement! I’m sure test scores will skyrocket!
I think that the fact that you even question that the youngsters don’t know more then you shows your “privilege” or maybe it shows that you are not “woke” or something like that. The problem is the kids will either have to allow you into their safe space to teach you (which means that the safe space is no longer a safe space) or will have to come out of their safe space which means that they are no longer safe.
Someone needs to look into the connections between Exeter and Dr. Dimes. Because that’s some AMAZING rent-seeking.
Do you know what I can’t find on that website?
Prices.
But I suppose when taxpayers foot the bill, it’s best to keep prices hidden.
Guys, these tables are eco-friendly!
That’s a weight off of my mind.
Well the sixties baby boomers were the first really peer dominated generation. What could go wrong with formalizing it? Didn’t they all learn everything that’s important in Kinder?
Do you know how old the sculpture is? Heinlein once said that a university consisted of a log with a teacher at one end and a student at the other.
How much do these things run? I couldn’t find anything besides “contact the company” which is usually a scary sign!
The price is “How-affluent-is-your-school? dollars.”
We’re a public school so we’ll probably get the cheap Chinese laminate knock-off
Great post. This cr*p is nothing more than creeping collectivism. (“There’s no ‘I’ in ‘TEAM’!”) My daughter had some group projects in high school, and it was always the same. One or two kids did all the work, and the lazy little schlub who barely showed up got the same grade as the worker bees. And I once read of a “progressive” school where they bragged that they don’t call them “teachers” – they call them “facilitators” who stay out of the way and let the children “discover” for themselves. Translation: They don’t do their jobs.
I see this sometimes in new managers at work. They seem to believe that their role should be to preside and evaluate; subordinates get the problems solved and the work done. They can survive if their subordinates didn’t really need a supervisor, but if they get promoted to a level where they are expected to initiate a strategy or define what progress should look like, they are … ineffective.
It seems like a poor imitation of the Chevruta method. Which does have a rather extensive track record.
Good or bad?
Who knew, that those who can’t do teach was actually a prophecy, one that has been fulfilled by a piece of furniture. Judging by my philosophy of aesthetics course, and my course in fine arts this table comes from the early hideous school of furniture. Metaphorically speaking of course.
This is a major problem, here. It’s like asking the students who received A’s to share a portion of their grade with those who (hadn’t studied) received lower grades – in the name of fairness.
Great post, Paula, and great responses.
As far as I can tell, this is an old fad, not a new one. The name is new and the furniture is new, but the fad is old. I call it “learning via students pooling their ignorance.”
Yuh! How come, in the OP, you left out the biggest drawback: kids don’t know sh-t! (They think they do, and it’s up to teachers to disabuse ’em of that delusion. ). So how, and what, are they going to “learn from each other”?
Ordinarliy I wax nostalgic about my daughter’s single-digit years–but this makes me glad she’s through.
You could take that right back to classical Athens. And still no way to improve on it.
To which 80% of American high schoolers say “huh?”
I’m getting so irritated at the thought of this. What’s next? In first grade, we just lock the kids in with some books. Maybe they’ll teach each other to read! But if they don’t, if they just build towers with the books, or tear out the pages to make paper airplanes–that’s okay, too!
Grrrrrrrr….
As a former classroom teacher, I like the idea of doing this sort of work, but with particular guidelines:
The problem with all these fads is that they tend to preach “one trick to teach them all.” What works is variety.
Ha! Did I mention that the progressive school with the “facilitators” I mentioned earlier also doesn’t grade the kids?
It’s not something I like to think about.
I’m thinking “huh?” unless it’s a “Lord of the Flies” reference.
It was.
I think, though, that the scourge will always be with us. Remember how C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair starts? Jill and Eustace are being tormented at a “progressive” English school, from which they escape into Narnia.
At the end of the book, having endured a frozen wasteland, hungry giants, a gloomy underworld, and a devious witch, they come back and beat the crap out of the bullies with the flats of their swords:
Uncanny, isn’t it? The rest is quite fun; find it here.