What is Harkness, and How Do You Teach It?
Shelby Clark
I started my first day at the GCI Summit and Seminar for Educators observing the Seminar for Educators– nine educators from all over the world who had come together to learn more about the "GCI Method." GCI– Global Citizens Initiative– brings together student fellows and educators from all over the world each summer for a week to learn more about Design Thinking, student-centered learning (the Harkness Method), and intercultural citizenship and human connectivity. Student fellows leave the week prepared to engage in a nine-month "glocal" project oriented around making changes on a UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). As some of you might not be familiar with this pedagogy, I wanted to share some reflections for you to think about as you consider bringing Harkness pedagogy into your classrooms.
Educators spent their first day at the Summit learning about Design Thinking and, on the second day, engaged in learning about Harkness as a student-centered discussion pedagogy. What were some take-aways?
How is Harkness different from a Socratic Seminar?
Figure 1.
Schrodt, K., Smith, L., FitzPatrick, E., & Liu, J. (2023). Facilitating Critical Discussion of Picturebooks Through Socratic Seminars in a Kindergarten Classroom. Early Childhood Education Journal, 1-18. Retrieved here.
In a Socratic Seminar, students may speak to one another. However, more often than not, the teacher is still in charge of the discussion and has an end goal in mind for where they want the conversation to go. For the most part, students still look to the teacher to guide the discussion.
In a Harkness discussion, teachers do not have a content-related end goal in mind– students should be the leaders of the conversation. They should not be looking at the teacher but should instead be looking at each other.
See the image above. In the first, a more traditional Socratic Seminar, the discussion is continually guided by the teacher. In contrast, in the second, the kindergarten class has moved towards a Harkness discussion, wherein the conversation is equally distributed among all class members.
Facilitator Molly Simmons noted that teachers should think of Harkness as "learning as play."
What's happening at the table? What are students discussing?
Students are analyzing a text, whether a book, an article, a podcast, a media clip, etc. Molly Simmons noted that you, as the teacher, must be "VERY intentional about the texts that you choose." Preparation for a Harkness teacher is:
Finding useful and evocative texts for the table.
Annotating the texts.
Figuring out what questions you have about the texts as a teacher.
Determining your questions for students.
Students should be prepared for class by reviewing and annotating this text. Ms. Simmons noted that students often learn how to annotate a text through Harkness. Anytime they make a point and do not provide evidence to back it up, teachers can ask, "Where do you SEE that in the text?" Through such questions, students begin to mark the evidence they need in their texts.
Ms. Simmons also noted that there were several other ways that she prompted students to annotate their texts, including asking students:
"What are words you don't get? Note those"
"Show me the page where you talked to the text the most."
To "Note questions in the margins."
"Show me how you're preparing, and I'll give you an 'in' tomorrow in the conversation."
She stated that this last prompt was particularly useful for quieter students who have not yet figured out how to enter the conversation.
Notably, Ms. Simmons commented that, above all, it is about letting students bring to the table what they are noticing and what will help the students come to a deeper understanding of the text. She noted, "What you get curious about is what you remember,"-- reiterating that Harkness is about the teacher putting their ego aside and allowing students to come to their own realizations.
How do you involve students who are not participating? What about students who talk too much?
The idea of tracking the Harkness discussion was discussed several times throughout the day (learn more here). During a discussion, Harkness teachers often draw a Harkness table on a sheet of paper, mark the students around the table, and then draw lines across the table to indicate who is talking when to whom. Teachers sometimes include reference letters to tell if a student has referenced the text, asked a question, brought someone else into the conversation, and more.
At the Harkness table, students who talk too much are often called "Harkness warriors." Ms. Simmons observed that these students often need to practice their listening skills and tend to "LOVE tracking the conversation."
The tracking strategy can also work well for larger classes, where not all students can participate in a Harkness discussion simultaneously. Seminar Educators discussed using a fishbowl strategy with 12 students engaged in the Harkness discussion, while another eight students tracked the conversation from the outside. Then, if time permits, the teacher could "flip flop" so the other students could discuss – or, if not, they could periodically pause until the next class for the other students to contribute.
How do you start a Harkness class?
Do students sit down and start discussing? Ms. Simmons shared that perhaps in older grades (11th & 12th), she might sit down and ask, "Where do you guys want to start?" Otherwise, Ms. Simmons and the other Harkness instructors at the Seminar all shared ways to help open classes with icebreakers or additional ways to "ground" their students in their texts.
These included:
Pair and share, then share out with the table
Read the line of the text that impacted you the most
Put up a quote on the board that we should dive into
Do a quick reading quiz
Draw your favorite scene on the board
How do you assess Harkness?
Ms. Simmons was clear that "if part of your grade is discussion, it needs to be explicit." One way to create an assessment for Harkness discussed was to develop a clear rubric, such as using the 22 traits of a Harkness classroom to outline student expectations.
In particular, it was noted that teachers often need to be explicit with younger grade students (e.g., 9th graders), such as stating that they must speak 3 times per class. While this might encourage statements such as "I agree," Ms. Simmons noted that it's often okay for students to start this way as it gets them normalized towards speaking at the table.
If teachers need more objective assessments, Ms. Simmons suggested reading quizzes or creating precise 1-5 rating scales on your rubrics (such as ratings for how students move the discussion forward).
Summing Up
Ultimately, Ms. Simmons noted that Harkness "comes down to being an exercise in listening." She will call out students for repeating something another student says and does not want students to think that "loud is right." She similarly remains firm that Harkness is rooted in texts. She noted, "It's debate when no one is analyzing the text"-- not Harkness. Finally, Harkness means finding ways to create the psychological safety students need to participate at the table. Ms. Simmons spoke about "giving inroads" at the table for quieter students, teaching students not to call one another out but instead focus on learning how to help one another, doing warm-ups together, learning phrases such as "What I'm really interested in…" or "What I'm really curious about…" to respond to one another and more.
Later on my first day at the Summit, I watched student fellows engage in a Harkness warm-up with another Harkness teacher. The goal was for the student fellows to get through the entire alphabet with a fellow saying one letter and passing it off to another fellow without calling on one another; they needed to use body language or other means to indicate who could go next. If fellows spoke at the same time, they had to restart. These fellows had only known each other for a few days, yet just through this brief warm-up, I could see the magic of Harkness beginning to happen. Students laughed; they attended to each other's body language carefully; they listened intently. They didn't want to stop, sure that they just needed one more time to get it right. They were already joined as a group in search of a common goal. By the time they actually pulled out their texts for their Harkness discussion, they were ready to go.