Harkness Dialogue for School Transformation

New Vermont Education Quality Standards, Flexible Pathways and PLPs are both mandates and opportunities. Unless classroom practice for students and teachers is redesigned, the danger is that these initiatives will be little more than “check off lists,” and significant and persistent disparities between groups of students – the “achievement gap” – may widen. Unless strategies and structures that encourage students to take charge of their own education are implemented, young people will not have the skills and the dispositions to take ownership of PLPs. Without guided practice and clear models, teachers will not know how to work in new and innovative ways. We must undo what previous schooling has done to inhibit curiosity and the creative thinking of students. “If we want to engage students in thinking through our content we must stimulate their thinking with questions that lead them to further questions. We must resuscitate minds that are largely dead when we receive them. We must give our students what might be called “artificial cogitation” (the intellectual equivalent of artificial respiration)” (Paul, Martin, Adamson, 1989).

My initiative is to investigate the ways that Socratic dialogue can be used at the classroom level to create the fundamental shift to student-directed learning that must be at the heart of school transformation. Socratic dialogue places students at the center of the educational process; it fundamentally shifts the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship and places ownership and initiative for learning on the student. “It reduces the impact of misconception, aids students in organizing knowledge, cultivates higher order thinking skills, and helps students to direct and monitor their own learning” (Lam, 2011). In Socratic dialogue, students drive the discussion by asking deep, probing questions to investigate meaningful content, working collaboratively to search for knowledge, understanding and application.

Through my fellowship, I will work with students, faculty and administration to integrate Socratic dialogue into the fabric of our school, beginning in the ninth grade Core, including our Advisory program and the Personal and Future Explorations class (PFE) where students conceptualize their PLPs. The benefits to Harwood will be immense and transformative, radically altering the dynamics of instruction and our school culture. Student voice will grow, students and teachers will develop new partnerships and Harwood gain the tools to transform into a school where all students have the initiative, skills, self-confidence and self-knowledge to drive their own learning. As Peter Senge argues in Schools That Learn, “Schools can be re-created, made vital, and sustainably renewed not by fiat or command, and not by regulation, but by involving everyone in the system in expressing their aspirations, building their awareness, and developing their capabilities together.”