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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.
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I’m a parent of 4 left-handed children who always complained that the school desks with the writing surface attached on the right side were a pain in the rear for lefties. The above arrangement would seem to be a problem for righties. I suppose letting the kids decide how to sit based on handedness would cause too many problems.
I’m glad I went to school when group projects were a rare novelty. My kids all seemed to hate working in groups. Hmmm, maybe there is a correlation between left-handedness and group skills!
How are you going to indoctrinate the wee ones with leftist rubbish if you don’t feed it to them. Don’t they consider that some of these groups will know a thing or two about the real world and come to some realistic, conservative conclusions? When that happens, the only recourse the teacher will have is a failing grade.
That is an excellent point. I’d say the same thing about the fad of using primary sources for learning history in high school. It doesn’t hurt to familiarize students with the use of primary sources, but life is too short to do all of one’s learning of history that way. If students remained kids for a hundred years or so, maybe there would be enough time for that method. But they are growing up in real time. A little bit of this fad can go a long way. No need go to extremes.
I have watched teachers who are very good at facilitating this type of learning. They provide a lot more guidance than the theorists and populizers let on. They have the educational philosophy behind it down pat, but in practice they are much better than their philosophy.
It also means that the way is open for them to do more indoctrination than education.
I’m proudly sinister, and those desks were a pain.
Only til 26 now.
The Harkness process is incompatible with a number of modern practices such as not killing left-handers in infancy.
Excellent, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa
Uh, yes, there is.
It is in the, uh, [expletive]
My problem with school based group work was that ALWAYS, one person, usually me, who wanted a decent grade so would do the entire project, because the others, a) Could not do the work, b) Did not want to do the work, or c) Would not do the work, so if I stepped up:
I performed at least 85-90% of the work, resulting in an A- because the last 10% was done shoddily.
I completed all of the work and got an A.
Or if we really did it as a group project a C or C-, because only the part I completed was any good.
I learned quickly that if I wanted to learn anything, I had to do it myself, because learning from the others was impossible. Maybe it was my fault, maybe I just don’t work well with others, but to me, group projects failed miserably.
As an adult, working with a group of other highly selected persons who can be relied to complete a task themselves, group projects worked OK, but in school, at least every school I attended, it NEVER worked.
A model that sometimes works, is to do a full draft myself, and then do a group review of the draft, because having many eyes look at a full draft will usually improve it, but not getting to the initial draft. One can reverse this, and let many individuals write the draft, then have one talented writer correct/polish the draft, and that can work as well.
Classes heavy on group work, I usually bought a couple of extra textbooks and did a lot of unassigned work, so I could learn the subject, because the class sure wasn’t teaching what the syllabus said it should.
This same pattern held from elementary school through graduate college work.
When I went back to college (after the Army) I was 3-4 years older than my Freshman classmates. A reocurring exercise, intended to build confidence in the wisdom of groups, was to present a scenario — desert survival, for example, or moon trek — and for each member of the group to complete about 20 multiple choice questions about specific actions to take or choices to make to succeed in the scenario (usually by surviving). Then the group would repeat the exercise with discussion among themselves. Most of the time, the group score would be higher than any individual score. TaDa! Group learning works!
Except … I always outscored everyone, including the group score. Experience (remember, I was older and had done things outside an academic environment) is more valuable than pooling ignorance and wishful thinking.
Group learning works best when group members are reasonably equivalent in ability, motivation, and cooperation. When some group members are significantly above/below the group average, you get take-over/free-rides, which doesn’t accomplish the purpose of the group learning.
Sorry for the late reply @randywebster. Frustrating when life intrudes on Ricochet, isn’t it?
James Garfield is said to have said “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other” during a commemoration dinner for Hopkins, the longtime president of Williams College and Protestant apologist. There’s some controversy over his exact words amongst those who are controversed by such things.
I’d like to think the sculpture is a 21st Century piece executed by a very personable, stocky young man I once nearly sold an Albany townhouse to fifteen years ago. The light wasn’t right in both the upstairs loft space and his bank account. We spoke about a commission he was awaiting from Williams College for a work based on Garfield’s quote.
He talked such an inspiring game. I’d like to think he plays the game this well, too.
I occasionally assigned group projects to my business law students (community college), and I made it a major part of the assignemnt that each member of each group had to evaluate in writing and assign a grade to the contributions of each other member of that student’s group, to be submitted in confidence to me. The peer review portion was worth up to 25% of the project score for each student. It was not a flawless device but it did reduce or expose the freeloading phenomenon quite effectively.
Good post!
The misunderstanding of the introverted student is a very old pedagogical error. Confucius had the decency to repent of it. From the Analects of Confucius:
My son went to St. John’s College where almost all of the courses are taught using Socratic method. The results are generally excellent. Of course the material is excellent (all original texts), and there are very strict rules about how the discussion goes, for example: you have to stick to the text. It is interesting to attend one of the parents’ sessions and see how the parents make absolute fools of themselves, bringing in all sorts of personal baggage. Every good idea can be implemented poorly.
One of my Econ professors used to call this method the “Group Grope” method. All of his upper division Econ classes started out as the ‘seminar’ style. Eventually, many devolved into lectures because half the students were just treading water, not having prepared. This method can work, only after some grist has been thrown in by a reading or lecture. But of course, we never had a cool table to sit around, that would have been a game-changer.
Unlike, you know, wood.