The last couple weeks I have been doing Harkness discussions in all my classes, 9th, 10th, and 12th graders. This has been an expansion from last year, where I just used it in my AP World History classes. I have continued to appreciate how Harkness discussions provide opportunities for engagement, application of learning, analysis, and student voice.

Using the Harkness method with freshman took some preparation work. It was new for most of them and the description of just discussing course content for an entire block filled many of them with dread. We started slow back in September, with small group jigsaws and other Kagan structures that helped facilitate basic academic discussion. I wanted students talking about content as much as possible to build strong habits and confidence. Through nearly two weeks of this, we unpacked a number of secondary texts and primary sources that built on the content and skills that had been instructed in earlier lessons. At that point they were ready for their first formal (yet formative) Harkness.

As it began, students more often added examples, explained agreement, or spoke for the purpose of speaking. With some guidance and targeted questions they pushed towards the goal of deeper analysis and insight. The content was not easy, they were discussing Scholasticism, Humanism, and early-modern theories of knowledge. Likewise, primary sources from Machiavelli, Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, and others demanded a lot of brainpower. Thanks to frequent practice and support they did well. Putting in the time early in the year has been paying dividends as I have continued with Harkness through the semester.

Last year, I used a rather basic rubric to guide the Harkness regardless of whether it was formative or summative. The rubric led to many questions about how many times students need to talk, how many analytical comments they need to make, how many questions they need to ask, etc. I had to spend a lot of time with qualitative feedback to help them understand the holistic nature of Harkness scoring. I needed to make some adjustments to my rubric to help with this.

A colleague visited the famous Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire this past summer for their Harkness training institute. I adapted a new rubric (pictured below) from one of the resources he received there. It was interesting to hear about the variety of ways that Harkness was applied by their expert teachers depending on student grade level, discipline, or personal teaching style.

In general I like the single point rubric. It is simple and emphasizes a clear definition of proficiency while also creating room for qualitative feedback and reflection. The difficulty came with finding point values that reflected appropriate weighting compared to other summative assessments in the course. A previous post of mine has the earlier version of a rubric I used. One struggle of that rubric was defining the difference for students between a comment and a connection. I like my new iteration better as it clarifies the difference between participation in general and more in-depth critical thinking. I still don’t have a perfect answer to a student’s question about why they may have lost two points in a certain category without referencing how many times they spoke, or other quantitative data. I just try to emphasize the totality of their contributions over the course of the discussion and what evidence I have of learning based on particular skills or standards. I have not yet aligned this rubric with a standards-based grading system. That will be a project for future me.

The same colleague who had the summer training at Phillips Exeter also recently conducted two weeks of Harkness discussions where the final summative score was based on the growth over time of the two-week process. Embedding Harkness as more than just a summative assessment tool is an important part of making it work well. It becomes more second nature for students, and therefore more genuine.

The Harkness Table Diagram

When the Harkness is going on, I take notes on the usual “Harkness Table” diagram, as well as a more detailed chart that lets me track specific student comments. I have also taken to recording the summative Harkness discussions for this purpose. The students have really enjoyed seeing the Harkness diagrams this year. It provides a great way to reflect on performance, but also to emphasize the holistic nature of the scoring. Several students were surprised by patterns they noticed.

I color code my lines. Blue is a standard comment, green is a comment of greater analytical depth, and red are questions. You can see this group struggled with questions. Almost all of them came from me as I modeled how questions can be used to shape a discussion. I also create a handful of “codes” to track what I want to emphasize in a particular discussion. Between this and my notes on student comment content I give qualitative feedback about what went well and how students can improve. The feedback takes a lot of time, especially as I try to make it more efficient. However, as students get better at Harkness, I take a less active role in the discussion, and can focus more on tracking evidence of learning and student interactions.

Harkness Roles

A colleague has started using specific Harkness roles. I have not done this yet, but initial feedback from him has been positive. He assigned students these roles and limited their engagement to the specifics he set for each role. I liked how it forces students to consider the many different ways of getting involved in a discussion besides agreement and adding on additional examples. For fun, he had students guess each other’s roles at the end of a discussion. They also reflected on their role effectiveness. Over a multi-week process, giving students a chance to be multiple roles has provided lot of growth opportunities before any summative scores are assigned. I should add, we have both been doing the most Harkness in our non-AP courses where time allows for a bit more flexibility.

Equity Maps

The Equity Maps program has also been a fantastic tool for tracking Harkness discussions and helping students unpack the data of their involvement. An EAL teacher introduced me to this at the start of the year and I highly recommend it. As much as the data is useful tough, I do still like hand drawing my diagrams.

Final Thoughts

The more Harkness is integrated within each grade level, the stronger students get at it the following year. Several of our English teachers are doing it as well, which helps even more. At the moment, my best Harkness discussions occur in my AP Comparative Government course amongst seniors. They are the most experienced and most confident with academic discussion. Of course, the provocative content helps significantly.

I am all in on continuing this strategy. I love how it not only adds value to student learning, but makes class more meaningful and engaging. I don’t think I can do Harkness every day, but it is now a core piece of my pedagogy. Doing it frequently has forced me to reflect on the nature of my feedback and pushed me to get more creative with how I instruct historical analysis.