"THE BEGINNING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE WORK" Our First Harkness PLC at Harwood: Video and Materials

  

In the Republic, Plato wrote:

“You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.."

So it is with scaffolding for Harkness. We must  take the time to  teach  students the skills of civil discourse so that their discussions can be high quality, scholarly and value-added to learning. Our tendency is  to "bring them to the table" too early,  before they  have learned the soft skills of eye contact, body language and tone of voice and before they learned how to annotate materials and prepare for discussion.  Similarly, when we witness  students flailing in Harkness discussions, we  often resort to saying, "It is their fault; these students are just not capable of carrying on student driven  conversations." When students struggle at  Harkness, we  need to take a step back and ask ourselves, "What have I done to have them  learn and practice the necessary Harkness skills? What do they need help with?  What do I need to  teach or reteach to have the discussion go better the next time around?"

This year, our  Harkness PLC  is working with Aida Conroy from Panorama Education. Aida was formerly the Harkness mentor at Noble Academy in Chicago, and she has  been to our school and worked with our teachers for the past four years.We are grateful to have her  guide us in deepening our Harkness practice as we  deal with the challenges of COVID.

 In our first session, Aida took us through a process of "Reconnecting, Prioritizing and Strategizing"  to help us examine what  skills/elements of Harkness are the most important to us and how can we teach them in this new reality of keepings desks 6 ft apart and  only two  in-person days per week... See the video of our gathering here.  Here is the slide deck for the class and here is a link to notes that small groups developed for teaching soft skills.

What does engagement look like? Treat yourself and watch this short video for inspiration-  show it  to your students and ask them what evidence of engagement do they see? How do we create this sense of engagement in our classrooms?