Dialogues in Discovery: A Decade of Harkness Science Education

Offering insights into my day-to-day teaching and the journey that has brought me to where I am today. This is a chapter from a book we are publishing this year celebrating "15 Years of Harkness".

One of my favorite Rick Rubin quotes from his new book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” is; “It’s okay to have a job that supports your art habit”.

I have had my “job” that supports my “art habit” for almost 13 years now, but don’t often talk or write about it as it is totally unrelated to this project. Also, I don’t love the word “job”, because I actually love my career, but I do love the sentiment as it is my job that affords me the time and money to continue pursing my art habit(s), as SoEV does not generate any income.

I have recently embarked on co-editing and publishing a book covering the transformation of the school I have been at for the last 13 years and thought I would share my chapter from the book as it covers what my “job” really is.

I am a secondary school teacher and one of the most frequent interactions I have with people through my SoEV project is:

“Are you a full time photographer?”

Where I usually answer: “no, I’m a teacher”.

In which they follow: “oh, do you teach photography at Emily Carr or something?”

In which I respond: “no, I’m a high school chemistry teacher”.

Not taken at my school, but a school related photo none-the-less. Spring 2024. soev

From this interaction the conversation usually goes one of two ways: 1) Oh, I loved science in high school, I work in _____________ (some related field) or 2) oh god, I dropped science the second I could. Then we usually move past it, as most people just assume they know everything there is to know about being a teacher, since we all went to school and have had plenty of life experience with teachers of all sorts. Follow-up questions or comments are rare but usually fall into the realm of “I don’t know how you work with kids” or “I could never be a teacher”… Not great conversation.

The reality is, teaching today is drastically different than it was even when I was in high school (almost 20 years ago…) and it continues to change and evolve.

I am hoping that publishing this piece helps give some insights of what my day-to-day looks like for those who are curious as well as enlighten some of you who may assume that you know what is going on in schools these days. That being said, I am working in a pretty specific and special context.

The work of being a teacher, in general, is becoming increasingly complex, dynamic, and emotionally taxing, but I can’t imagine doing anything else. Social emotional learning, diversity, equity, and inclusion, new technologies, social media, sustainability, extra-curriculars, and being a mentor are all things all teachers are having to juggle on a daily basis, on top of teaching the curriculum, regardless of the context.

For a bit of the context into where I work; Southridge School is located in South Surrey, it is a small, independent, K-12 school. We are privileged to have small classroom sizes (anywhere from 8-18 students) where this type of “teaching pedagogy” flourishes (but we have also seen this pedagogy work with groups much bigger).

The school took a chance on me 13 years ago, coming straight out of university and I am forever grateful for the opportunity.

At this point of my career I am still a classroom teacher, but also so much more, including a basketball coach, advisor, curriculum leader and newly, a “Harkness coach”.

Unless you are also a teacher, you probably have never heard of “Harkness”, essentially; we sit around a conference table for classrooms and engage in “discussion-based learning”. Students are encouraged to ask questions without raising hands, discuss topics from previous lessons, and converse amongst one another to solve problems.

There are many other nuances and details about Harkness, if you are curious you can feel free to contact me for more information, or check the Southridge Harkness page for more information! I will cover many of them in the writing below.

Here is my chapter:

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Dialogues in Discovery: A Decade of Harkness Science Education

I believe my journey with Harkness is a fairly unique one. To be honest, I am not familiar with talking or writing about my own experience at the table. Over the past twelve years, I’ve been focused on the student experience in the classroom, amplifying student voices, and trying to understanding the benefits and challenges from their perspective. It has influenced everything I do from planning lessons, designing labs, running basketball practices, even my Master's thesis. Having this opportunity to explore and reflect on how I got here was enlightening, but it will require a bit of background in order to fully understand my current position and relationship with Harkness.

I was introduced to philosophy before I even began teaching my first class at Southridge, in fact, my entire teaching pedagogy/philosophy/methodology was changed before I sat in my first classroom as a teacher. 

Coming out of my four year science undergrad program, I was young, ambitious, and hungry to work in an employment climate that was, unfortunately, less than ideal in Ontario. During my Bachelor of Education program our professors and instructors were telling us “at this rate, you’ll either have to work “way up north”, “overseas”, or spend 10 years on the supply list.” I was not a fan of this prescription and was committed to starting my career as a full time teacher, willing to move across the country to do so. By chance, there was a posting at Southridge for a Science teacher. To this day I have no idea how I found the posting, but I know that the desire to move to the mountains helped draw me to look online at Alberta and British Columbia and luckily enough I found that posting. 

While wrapping up my B.Ed. degree, I created an online portfolio, applied to Southridge, and luckily, secured an interview. Following successful interviews, they invited me to give a demo lesson to assess my fit for the school. I flew out to Vancouver and prepared for my lesson using what I thought were the “freshest skills” a teacher could have. At the time, Southridge was focused on being tech-forward and so was my B. Ed. program, so it seemed like a perfect fit. I came prepared with an iPad and laptop all synced up, a fancy presentation and a lab demonstration to ‘wow’ the students. Having all the new tech bells and whistles, confident in my skills as a “presenter” it's safe to say I was overconfident, and very naïve. 

During this time I had developed my own ideas and conceptions of how a classroom should be run, thinking I was the “all knowing-owner of the content”, able to distribute it in my own way, with a bit of flair and tech, students would likely hang onto my every word and if they didn’t… their loss? It’s really the only approach I had experienced as a student, especially in the science courses I had taken. We often looked at our teachers and professors as the knowledge keepers with the high degree of content knowledge and experience in their field, unloading facts and figures onto students so that we can retain enough scientific information and regurgitate it in time for an exam or assignment. At this point I generally had some conceptions of what it meant to teach in a science classroom, but that would change soon enough. 

I flew to BC, taught a demo lesson, all the tech worked perfectly and the students seemed to enjoy the lab demo. I remember being “on display” for the majority of the class, giving it my all and ending the class with a demonstration and some practice problems. A few weeks later Southridge gave me an offer to come teach a full-time position in the fall. I was very excited but also overwhelmed as I had never even taught a full course. I figured I could easily replicate that practice lesson for each topic in my courses. I made my way to the Lower Mainland that summer but had to arrive early to school this year as they were going to be hosting a “special” professional development; something I “didn’t want to miss” as promised by the principal at the time.  

Little did I know, I would have an opportunity to begin my career as a teacher encouraged to explore Harkness. I can’t know for sure, but I believe without this opportunity, I don’t think I would be as engaged, invested, motivated, and satisfied with my work as a teacher and in reflecting back to what my conceptions of teaching were before I learned about Harkness and comparing them to now, 12 years later, has been fascinating. 

Integrating Harkness into Science

Letting go of being the source of knowledge in the science classroom can be difficult. Students (and teachers) often find comfort in the fact that their science educators have this perceived wealth of subject knowledge: experts in their specific field. In our schools context, this comes from many of the structures beyond our own control, such as the way we’ve historically organized our classes and textbooks into the four disciplines (biology, chemistry, earth science, physics), the reality of being “content-heavy” courses, the desire to excel in the AP Curriculum, among many others.

In my experience, the sciences are often presented in a way that emphasizes finding “correct” answers, valuing and studying the work of “the great thinkers”, and attempting to stay objective with data. There of course is value in all of those qualities, but I argue it does not lead to creative, empathetic, or diverse thinking within the field and in the classroom. As a student, I had also witnessed how it can also lead to stagnant lessons, leading students to be disengaged and assuming we could simply study later as the materials and same old content were reused year after year. This did not foster adjectives and descriptors we’d like to imagine at the forefront of science like “innovative, curious, experimental”, but rather “memorization, conformity, stasis”.

If I had not been exposed to Harkness, maybe I would have continued to use the same lessons I developed in my first few years: slide shows, practice worksheets, prescribed lab procedures. I imagine the content would be delivered sufficiently and the majority of the students would leave with some decent understanding and knowledge of chemistry concepts. However, I doubt that I would be as engaged as I am today, and I don’t think I would have made strong connections with the students as I have made in teaching with Harkness. I believe these connections strengthen students' understanding as they also become more engaged with the material as we engage as a community rather than isolated learners.

Within the first few years, I had the opportunity to develop my classroom pedagogy from a Harkness lens and it continues to be the way I look at every class today. Working on this takes some trial and error, experimentation, and data collection which sparked the scientific side of me I knew I had all this time but was not fueling through my undergrad. As you have read from the chapters preceding this one, at its best, Harkness fosters questioning, critical thinking, and engagement at the table and I needed to find ways to integrate more of it into my classroom. Imagine where the scientific community (and the world at large) would be today if the previous generations focused more on collaboration and less on competition.

Initially, there was a “safety” I found in trying to adapt old lessons handed down to me from the years prior, but as I grew more confident in the material, my desire to shift into a more democratic, exploratory, conversation style classroom took over my planning process. Rarely am I able to “give” the same lesson twice, nor do I really want to. Each group of students brings their own unique strengths and weaknesses and these are magnified when we encourage them to discuss and interact with one another in order to discover the scientific skills and content. Although the content doesn’t change too drastically from year to year, the way the students interact with the content, and one another, does. 

In content-heavy courses such as the senior sciences, it is easy to get trapped into rote memorization and facts and figures (which are all sometimes necessary of course) but when I am able to ask myself, “How can discussion fit into this lesson” I often notice that a new path of possibilities opens that allows us to take that content and explore it through a different lens.

Encouraging the students to do the “heavy lifting” is now at the core of most lessons; transferring the work to the students allows them to make those strong connections between concepts, and between their classmates that I believe really solidifies the knowledge. Offering them the opportunity to ask questions at any time, and being comfortable knowing it’s okay to seek clarification allows a more democratic classroom as they continue to take ownership over their learning as we scaffold these skills through their time at the school.

Other times, the course may require a complete break from the “content” to focus more on the science skills such as communication, critical thinking, and applying and innovating, which offers much more room for discussion. These breaks also allow the class to explore science through a different set of principles and concepts, such as ethics, environment, or equity, which I would argue had always been missing from the more “traditional” science spaces.

Developing empathy in science through discussion

A few years ago, while working on ways to authentically integrate discussions into content-heavy (and exam-focused) courses, I decided to offer an opportunity for my Chemistry 12 and AP Chemistry 12 students to engage in scientific conversations that were focused on the pressing issues, emerging technologies, and puzzling questions that we face as a scientific community.

After a few iterations of running “student-led discussions”, it has turned into what is often cited as the students favorite aspect of taking chemistry at the school. While this may seem like too far of a departure from the content of the course, this is the most valuable exercise we undertake as a class, and it would not have been integrated without having the goal of having more Harkness in my chemistry classroom. There are many opportunities to use discussions with regards to the content, of course, but the depth of conversations and the variety of topics available in running an activity like this is unmatched.

The task for students is quite simple; they need to lead a discussion where they pick a scientific topic that interests them and gather resources and create questions that explore the ethical and/or environmental issues associated with that topic. They share those resources and discussion questions with the class a week before the discussion so that their peers, and myself, can prepare.

Topics in these discussions have included; mental health and neuroplasticity, genetic engineering, the financial and mental cost of postsecondary education, studies on fake news and social media, science of music, mining in space, psychedelic therapies, artificial intelligence, diversity in the workplace and classroom, civil engineering for greener cities, and many, many more.

I will always defend my position in taking anywhere from five to ten full classes a year to have these discussions as I believe it strengthens many aspects of what we need in our future scientists.

With none of us at the table being “experts” in any particular field, it opens the room to have no “one source of knowledge”, rather, we build an understanding of the topic together. This usually starts with an overview of the subject and then moves into a deeper dive using guiding questions prepared by the student facilitators. This not only allows students to feel the ownership over the conversation, it also builds a more democratic classroom as I often have to stumble and ask questions through topics alongside them, rather than pulling them along as I sometimes have to do with the content. The students are often able to synthesize information from other courses or resources to help enrich and push the conversation as well.  Of course, a level of trust and willingness to share and change your own understanding is at the heart of many of these topics as there are usually points of tension or controversy within some of them.

The goal is to always build our understanding of the topics together, celebrating differing opinions and perspectives as that allows us to grow a better view of the rapidly changing landscape of science. Having students be comfortable with differing opinions and pushing them to value and respect their differences, but work together within those tensions, all while learning a new topic, is what I believe to be the most important part of my science classroom and developing the scientists of the future.

Conclusion 

My journey from a traditional, content-focused science educator to embracing the Harkness method has been a transformative journey. Shifting from the notion of being the sole purveyor of knowledge to fostering a more democratic and exploratory classroom has not only enriched my teaching experience but has impacted student engagement and understanding. The transition from a tech-heavy, presentation-style approach to one centered around discussions has opened new avenues for exploration and encouraged students to take ownership of their learning. 

Although I would love to provide some hard data to back up my claims that students learn science better with this method, it is impossible to measure using classical tools such as performance on tests or titrations. However, year after year, the anecdotal evidence I collect in the reflections on the student-led discussions and genuine thanks I receive at the end of the year continues to fortify my conviction in this teaching philosophy.

Above all, I continue to receive notes years later as alumni reflect on their time in the discussion-based classroom, citing pivotal moments in discussions in which they were able to change their own way of thinking, learn from their peers, or explore a topic they had never thought about before, leading to pathways they may have never considered if they had just been committed to rote memorization of the curricular content.

As I continue to evolve my teaching methods, the Harkness philosophy remains a guiding force, emphasizing the importance of collaborative learning, diverse perspectives, and a dynamic, ever-adapting energy to navigating the nuances of science education. This journey has not just altered the way I teach; it has redefined my role as an educator, highlighting that the true essence of education lies in empowering students to become active participants in their learning journey and fostering a genuine passion for the evolving world of science.

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Thanks for reading.

If you are in education (or not) and you’d like more information, feel free to reach out, part of my role as a Harkness Coach is to help teach others about the methodology!