I learned about the Harkness method of teaching today. It's so fascinating to me that there are all these different ways to teach and learn.
Summary of the Harkness method:
- Students sit in an oval table with a teacher. There are 13 people at the table.
- Teacher provides a math problem or a foreign text like Latin and the students through discussion and collaboration figure out how to solve the problem or translate the text.
- If 1 student gets it wrong, the other students ask questions to try and guide the student to the error instead of pointing it out.
- There is little intervention from the teacher and the students teach each other. Toughest part for teachers sometimes is becoming comfortable with prolonged silence. :)
- Grading is based on participation and they have these maps called Harkness maps where they trace with lines the flow of conversation.
