Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to 1810, a podcast produced by the Lawrenceville School. In 18 minutes and 10 seconds, we explore the future of education with insights from bright minded individuals, inspiring new ways of thinking.
I'm Pierre Koestra. It's my privilege to serve as the Robert S. Dow and Christina Sykes Dow Master Teaching Chair in Harkness Learning. And and I'm joined today by a member of the class of 2026, Willem Anton. Willem, we should both introduce ourselves so that people who are listening have a little bit of a sense of what we do here at the school.
What are some of the defining dimensions of your experience as a Laurentian?
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Of course. I am a tri varsity athlete, member of the water polo team, swim team and rowing team. I'm also one of the members of the Laurentians choir, which, which I've been doing ever since sophomore year. I'm a tour guide on campus and as a freshman, all the freshman boys kind of converge into one sweat filled house called Raymond. They're also seniors that decide to prefect back and that's what I'll be doing. So I'll kind of be teaching people how to tie their ties, figure out, you know, what they're doing at Lawrenceville. And I'm very, very excited. I think it's kind of like the culmination of what I've been doing and I think it really speaks to how I've gone from being somebody who was led to becoming a leader on campus.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Great. Let me say in advance, thank you so much for doing that work. It's really, really important and thank you for joining me today.
I do my work primarily in the English department. When I'm convening my own courses, I'm sitting at a Harkness table in a classroom where we use seminar discussion to explore works of literature. That's our bread and butter. I also spend ample time in my role as the Harkness Teaching Chair, visiting other classrooms, watching what's happening to make the learning in math, science, foreign language, religion and philosophy, the performing arts, the visual arts. In all these different realms of academic endeavor, Active, collaborative, effortful and reflective. The criteria that help to make Harkness work.
When you think about Harkness, what are some of the first things that come to mind? First principles that help to animate a class that's engaged in really rich learning in any and all of these different academic realms.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: I mean, the first words that come to mind are discussion and listening. When I first actually before I got to Lawrenceville, when I was applying, I remember my dad told me, willem, I See, on this website, they have this Harkness model. And this is gonna be really important. You gotta work this Harkness angle to get into Lawrenceville. But it wasn't really like something that I understood. It was kind of just a buzzword at that point. And in freshman year, everybody thinks that they're great at Harkness, but really you're kind of just all saying your own opinion or what you heard another person say. I think what's critical to Harkness is being open minded, kind of using other people's opinions or, you know, what they find to be interesting about a certain topic, to criticize, craft what you think about something. And that doesn't just apply to the English classroom or the history classroom. It could be pretty much anywhere.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: You just put special emphasis on what you think about something. Let me ask you, what are some of the different phases of scholarly engagement in which you, as a committed practitioner of Harkness, learning form and reform and refine what you think about something?
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Right. So let's say we're in an English classroom. I think first you would have to understand what's going on, right? That's the first phase. Like, you have to be engaged in the conversation. You have to do the preparation that's necessary. And preparation looks like coming with something. I found literally anything interesting to say about the topic. So if I'm a soloist in the Laurentians, right, I'm performing a solo. Preparation for me would be I have something that I want to convey some sort of emotion through the lyrics, right? That's the preparation. And then the discussion is really about how do we make that a reality. So preparation could be a desire to, you know, understand something. Right. It could be motivation. It could be just sitting back. I remember. Who was it? I think it was Chris Rock. He said he was talking about relationships. He wasn't really talking about Harkness, but he was saying sometimes you're the lead singer, sometimes you're playing tambourine. Right. And when you're playing tambourine, even though it's not the most important job, you still have to play it. So you have to come prepared to be the lead singer or come prepared to play tambourine.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Agreed. And I'm curious, when you come prepared, what are some of the ways in which you then maximize your ability to activate that preparation? What are some of the skills that you have to use in order to stay dialed in, whether you are the lead vocalist or the tambourine player?
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Right. Well, I mean, first of all, it's actually listening to somebody instead of just, you know, sometimes you're in that conversation where it's like the other person is kind of just trying to get to their next thing. You have to try and silence that part of your mind. And that was really hard for me at first. Because arcness isn't actually about dominating the conversation. You have to instead think about it like every single other person knows just as much as you, right? They all have a take that is worth considering. And then assuming that you guys all prepared correctly, the discussion kind of feeds off of itself.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: I'm hearing that language about preparing correctly. And I know that you and I both agree based on the conversations we've shared over the last couple of years, I know we both agree that preparing correctly doesn't mean that there's one way of doing things right. That for sure, when we're studying literature, when we're studying history, when we're reading a religious or philosophical text, we can't help but bring our own personal experience into what comes out of the interaction between us and that text. So correct preparation in a generic way means that we're all deeply engaged, and we're all engaged in highly motivated contemplation, and we're forming preliminary takes on what might be going on here. And we toss those out to try to stimulate discussion, to try to get real interchange going. And then part of what I hear you suggesting is that we are not just listening for the next opening in the discussion in which we can hold forth with our own take, but we are listening to what other people are saying in the sense that we're subjecting that to really deep, generous consideration. And we're trying to figure out, oh, as I take this in, what does it do to broaden my conception of the possibilities? Would you agree that that's a huge part of what's going on, that we're opening up and opening up?
[00:07:05] Speaker B: And it also has to do with semiotics. Everybody read the same thing. It's the same object, it's the same reference point. But everybody also brings an image in their mind of something different. They all have their own experiences. And through those experiences, you can have a greater understanding of what you just read, what you're trying to do. That's really what Harkness is all about.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: You and I have talked over the last couple of years in the Griswold house, sharing house life, about ways in which our seminar table education has really opened us up. I'm curious, can you think back and point to moments that were particularly formative for you when you realized, aha, I need to open up. I need to become more flexible. I need to become more generous towards ideas that are coming from points of view that are different from my starting place.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think Harkness really starts to accelerate when you enter your junior year, because freshman year, you're kind of figuring it all out. Sophomore year, you start to develop the skills. But I've found that especially in the essay writing class junior year, when everybody is kind of starting to think creatively, that's when the discussion really starts to pop off. So I'll give you an example. When you first read Khemu, right. And nobody understands what the hell he's saying, that's when you start to dive deep into the text, and you end with a totally different notion of what he was writing than what you entered with. And obviously, philosophers are famous for having writing that you don't really understand.
And when everybody's in that state of, I have no idea what I'm reading right now, you actually start to not come in with that initial bias towards your own opinion. And you kind of let go of your ego for a second, and everything kind of just, you know, let's try this idea. Or, you know, I think. I think you're right, but maybe you're missing something, and that's when the discussion really starts to take off.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: That's great. So it sounds, from what you're saying as though humility is important.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: It's very important, yes.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: And it also sounds to me as though what you're suggesting is that when you are engaging a philosophical text, difficulty is important, that humility is integrally related to recognizing. We don't know exactly what's going on here.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Learning has to be difficult. It cannot be easy if you're just kind of reading something and you're like, lady Macbeth was bad. Okay.
What are you really taking from that? It's through the hardship at Lawrenceville that I found that there's actually that it's worth doing. You know what I mean?
[00:09:48] Speaker A: I know exactly what you mean. And I love the fact that you are letting out a good laugh and that as you say that and talk about hardship, your eyes are alight with joy and excitement. I experience the same thing I tell my students all the time. We're reading this precisely because it's difficult.
This is gonna be a real challenge that is gonna force us to come together as a team and use all of the resources at our disposal. I'm also struck by the fact that you talk about studying such a text in A way that sounds to me very much like the practice of science.
Engaging in direct observation, formulating hypotheses, acknowledging up front, this is a hypothesis. I am venturing a first take, and I'm relying on the rest of the group to provide me with constructive critical feedback and to keep this thing growing, or if it doesn't work out, to reject it, replace it, and then figure out a new angle of approach.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: And that's a perfect example of how you can apply Harkness to, for example, stem, where in a calculus classroom, you can understand something that you would have thought is totally beyond you. Because when you're in that classroom, everybody's kind of conjuring up their own ideas to the subject. You find something that was totally, you know, out of your realm, starts to enter it, and you kind of feel a sense of pride. Right. Because, you know, this is a very difficult thing that I've attempted to grasp here with all of these other people and with this conversation that we've had. We've gotten so much further than if we were by ourselves.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: That sounds to me, again, like something that relates very much to Stem in the broader sense of engineering, where we try to make something work by creating a deliberate redundancy. Let's have things that back one another up so that if something breaks, something else can help to deliver us to wherever we're trying to go.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Exactly. And with engineering, when you're working with other people, you're gonna encounter moments where you guys are kind of at each other's throats as you're like, this has to be the only way for us to make this thing work. But you have to keep an open mind. And it's so difficult. But Harkness is one of those methods that you're able to sort of figure it out.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: I love what you're saying about sometimes being at each other's throats. And I'm reminded of something I was reading earlier in the summer about Wilbur and Orville Wright, who deeply believed that their effectiveness as an engineering tandem derived from the fact that they spent hours a day going really hard at each other, each venturing his own sense of how to solve a particular design problem, and the other just bringing a withering attack. Every possible challenge to that idea that might point out where it would fail ended up being precisely why they were the first to get that aircraft off the ground at Kitty Hawk. It didn't stay aloft long. The ways in which it succeeded were illuminating and affirming to them. Also, the ways in which it failed made Them go back and design much more carefully. But they got there in the first place in part because they spent hours a day trying to anticipate every possible source of failure and then to come up with a design that would help to carry them past that.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: If you have an idea and it doesn't face any scrutiny, it's not an idea that's worth mentioning in the first place because it's just not. It's not worth it. Because most ideas are not appreciated in the beginning. But you have to play devil's advocate a little bit. You have to say, would this work? And that's a very difficult thing to do. But Harkness kind of teaches you that.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: I agree that at least initially, it's a difficult thing to do. On the other hand, I have to say that one of the things that I find so delightful about working with a range of students here in usually in forms three and five are sophomores and seniors, but sometimes in the second and fourth forms as well, is that initially students are hesitant to challenge one another's ideas because that violates. Yeah, in a way that violates the rules of mainstream social culture.
But they learn eventually that a challenge doesn't have to be anything other than gracious. Right. It can be.
Oh, Willem, that's so interesting. I had never thought of that before because it's new to me. I don't yet understand.
Could you walk me through how you got there? Right. That tone is critical in intellectual intention. I'm trying to figure something out, but it's not critical of the person. It's not in any way attacking.
I'm curious. You were talking about how Harkness can apply equally in the mathematical realm. Calculus in other elements of stem.
You were talking about how you have found it useful in English. Can you talk about Harkness in other parts of your Lawrenceville life? For example, earlier you mentioned being a member of the Laurentian's choir. Is Harkness learning culture in any way relevant in that arts realm?
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Absolutely. When you're standing next to a bunch of other kids your age and you're kind of trying to come up with the goal of let's create something beautiful, reacting to other people's tones and the way that they sing when you're standing right next to them, that is a discussion in itself. You're self correcting and you're improving your ability to listen to others with the goal of matching them or counteracting them, perhaps, or harmonizing with them. And it's through that shared bond in the community that do you challenge each other? Absolutely. Sometimes you're looking at a note, right? You all have your sheet music in front of you. Sometimes you're looking at it and you're like, I think you're singing this thing wrong every single time, man. And then the guy next to me might be like, no, actually, I think you're being an idiot, Willem. And, you know, I'll admit most of the time it's me who's the idiot. But absolutely, Harkness applies to singing and not just in a choir. For example, when you're doing a solo, right, you know what you want to convey and you have to have the adequate preparation for it because the notes are not necessarily going to change. But the way that you sing, right? The specific ways, methods that you can show that emotion, those are kind of a discussion between the person that is maybe playing the piano for you and, you know, has to figure out what you're trying to do, or maybe the choir director who has to bring in the choir, or you who has to put on the performance.
It's kind of a discussion on how you're going to accomplish that goal. So it kind of shows up everywhere. Even in water polo, right? Like, the best water polo teams are basically having a discussion as they play, like, oh, let's throw the ball over there, right, so that we can try and, you know, move the defense this way. And it's very difficult to do. I'll admit I was probably the worst on the team at it because you have to figure out how to have a discussion without a lot of oxygen in your body because obviously you're thrashing around in the water. But when you become more experienced, you understand how to make those decisions quicker. And that's probably why it's one of my favorite sports.
That's 1810 for today. Inspiring ideas from Lawrenceville to you. We look forward to our next exploration.
If you have comments or questions about today's episode, please reach out to communicationrenceville.org we're always interested to hear your ideas. A transcript of today's episode is available at elville810.castos.com.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: In our next episode, Willem and I will discuss how Harkness extends beyond the academic classroom into the co curricular realm.
1810 is produced and edited by the communications department at the Lawrenceville School with Engineering by Sheun Aladeshe.
Special thanks to Jess Welsh, Andrea Farishte and Lisa Gillard for their inspiration and guidance.
