How often and which classes use the Harkness method at Lawrenceville and St Paul? Please guide me if you know about it.
Many schools incorporate the “Harkness method”. At our kiddo’s school, the experience you may be describing takes place in English, History, Ethics, Health and Foreign Language (advanced level for our kiddo)
At St. Paul’s, truly Harkness classes are Humanities. Math is definitely not.
At Lville they use the Harkness table in the humanities classes (english, history, etc). The language, math and science use a psuedo-harkness format whereby the students sit in a U shaped pattern, but at their own desks. This again varies by teacher, depending on the room setup.
But most of the Harkness tables are in Woods Memorial Hall and in Noyes. The other buildings use a mixture of desks/tables.
I think differentiating between Harkness (who went to SPS btw), with Harkness tables, vs. Socratic method type teaching. Many boarding schools excel at utilizing small classes with discussion based learning even if it isn’t around a Harkness table.
Note on Lawrenceville: We do use Harkness tables/method in the Language department… they might have changed that since your child attended. Also, some science teachers have proper Harkness tables in their rooms. Math, however, varies quite a bit… Some teachers use the U shape described above, while others tend to focus more on small group work, where there are usually 4 groups of 3-4 students who work together on problems, then afterwards, the entire class convenes to discuss solutions.
@confusedaboutFA: yes you’re right. I forgot about language. My son took 4 years of spanish. And for two of those years, they were standard Harkness table format. In the other two, they were in the U-shaped, or individual desk format. But regardless of the setup, the Harkness style was used exclusively in the language department.