by Jonah Lehrer
The Harkness gift led Exeter to pioneer the Harkness method. In the typical school, the teachers perform for the students. They are responsible for breaking down the material and constructing the knowledge. In a Harkness class, the cognitive load is designed to be on the students, who are tasked not just with memorization but with figuring out what they need to remember. “Harkness teaching can take many different forms, but it’s really student-centered, student-led discussions,” says Meg Foley, an instructor of history at Exeter affiliated with the Exeter Humanities Institute, which trains teachers in the Harkness method. “The philosophy is really that the students are doing the heavy lifting and the teacher is there to nudge, facilitate, make sure the dynamic is a good one.”
The shift from the passive lecture required a new curriculum. While the traditional classroom focused on the delivery of answers, the Harkness method emphasized open-ended questions, which could generate lively conversations. Students were given problems, not facts. They were expected to disagree and discuss, to delve into the mystery on their own.
It’s a radical approach with deep roots. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s nineteenth-century writings on education, he frequently lamented the soul-crushing strictures of American schooling. “I call our system a system of despair,” Emerson wrote. The typical class “sacrifice[s] the genius of the pupil, the unknown possibilities of his nature, to a neat and safe uniformity.”2 In place of these rules, Emerson emphasized the need for student independence; children learn best when they teach themselves. “Everybody delights in the energy with which boys deal and talk with each other, the mixture of fun and earnest, reproach and coaxing, love and wrath.” His point was that teachers should harness this youthful energy, not suppress it by delivering sermons and insisting on silence.
The Noble administrators were determined to bring Emerson’s philosophy to their Chicago schools. They were persuaded by the anecdotal experience of those summer students, but also a larger belief in social justice. As Pablo Sierra, one of the Noble administrators who led the initial Exeter collaboration, told the American Scholar, “I wanted to give my kids what Exeter kids get.”3 Classroom discussion shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for students at fancy private schools.
But the leaders of the Noble Network wanted to experiment with the Harkness method for another reason also: their test scores had hit a ceiling, a problem the administrators had come to call “the Noble Plateau.” In 2003, when Noble began tracking achievement tests, their students had an average score of 17.3 on the ACT, a test of college readiness. By 2011, that score had risen to 20.3, which was 3.1 points higher than the students’ peers in the Chicago public schools. But then the progress stalled: by 2014, three years later, the Noble ACT scores had failed to increase significantly.
This test score plateau was a symptom of a larger disappointment. Although nearly 90 percent of Noble graduates started at a four-year college, only 40 percent ended up graduating. What’s more, Noble’s own surveys showed that less than 10 percent of graduates ended up in “high-powered careers,” such as law or medicine. The Harkness method helped Exeter students prepare for these professions. Could it also help students at Noble?
Implementing the Harkness method on a Noble campus, and not at an elite prep school, had challenges. Because all Noble campuses are nonselective—they take every student who applies, as long as there’s space—the incoming students often reflect the broader struggles of the Chicago public school system. Many freshmen are years behind grade level. They lack effective study habits. Eight-five percent come from low-income families. Fifteen percent are special-needs students. While Emerson imagined students conversing about the mysteries of Shakespeare and astronomy, most students starting at Noble are not proficient in reading and math. How could they possibly teach each other?
And there’s the problem of class size. The typical Exeter class has twelve students, all of whom fit around the Harkness table; the intimacy of the setup was deemed essential for an effective conversation. At Noble, most classes are closer to thirty students. It’s one thing to celebrate the “energy of youth” in a small group. It’s something else when the teacher is vastly outnumbered.
Despite these obstacles, the Noble Network began a Harkness experiment in 2009 featuring two groups of fifteen honor students. The administrators chose students with the highest reading scores because these students would be advanced enough to stay on grade level even if the Harkness experiment failed. Most people expected it to fail.
The results were stunning. After a semester of Harkness, thirteen of the thirty students aced the reading portion of the ACT; as a group, their reading scores increased by 30 percent more than their peers at the same Noble campus. The experiment was so successful that one of the teachers, Ms. Clark, decided to try out Harkness in two of her regular classes the next semester. Because these classes had more than thirty students, she had to create three separate Harkness tables; the room was a din of talking teenagers. But the trend remained the same: these students displayed a dramatic increase in reading scores.
Based on these exciting preliminary results, the Noble Network leaders decided to start the Noble Academy, which aimed to build on the promising early results of the Harkness experiments. The school opened in 2014, in a temporary location in downtown Chicago. Two hundred students signed up, most of them poached from the wait lists at other Noble campuses. Lauren Boros was the founding leader. “The first year was incredibly rocky,” Lauren says. “We put the kids right away at Harkness tables and it didn’t work. The conversations weren’t effective. And they weren’t effective because we hadn’t created the culture yet. The kids didn’t know how to work together. They didn’t know how to ask questions. They didn’t know how to listen.” Lauren pauses, as if she’s remembering that difficult first year. “Listening is really hard.”
The Noble Academy
Lauren Boros grew up a few blocks from the Cabrini-Green projects, on the nice side of North Avenue. “That street was our dividing line,” she says. “You stayed north of North Avenue and you were fine. You were in nice Lincoln Park. You went south and you were in Cabrini-Green. Growing up north of North Ave., you knew you never go south.” Lauren attended elite Chicago private schools before going to Columbia University. She was on the premed track when her New York City taxi smashed into a car making a left; Lauren was ejected from the vehicle. She needed eighteen stitches and twelve staples to close the wound in her head. Lauren was riding in the taxi with her best friend, who was African American. Two ambulances showed up. Lauren was taken to New York-Presbyterian, a hospital on the Upper East Side affiliated with Columbia and Cornell. Her friend was taken to a run-down hospital in the Bronx. “It was one of those moments where you realize that these injustices are not accidents,” Lauren says. “And even though I was premed, I decided that I wanted to work on these injustices, because I knew that they were keeping kids from reaching their potential.”
After graduation, Lauren signed up for Teach for America. She was assigned to a middle school in Gary, Indiana, and commuted from Chicago, leaving her apartment at six in the morning and returning fifteen hours later. “I grew some thick skin very quickly,” she remembers. “The very first day I walk in and the students called me ‘Barbie.’ I said, ‘You can’t call me that.’ So they said, ‘Fine. Miss Barbie.’ ”
It was an exhausting job, but Lauren had found her calling. After Teach for America, she worked at her first Noble campus, teaching algebra to ninth graders. Before long, she became the assistant principal. Two years later, she founded the Noble Academy.
I first met Lauren on a gorgeous late-September day, a month into the school year. It was Monday morning, and the hallways were bustling with students in the Noble uniform: black dress shoes, khaki pants, tucked-in navy polo shirts. After countless high fives in the hallway, and an emergency conversation with an assistant principal about a new student who was missing credits, Lauren led me to her office. We sat at an oval table—it’s
the only official Harkness table at the school, since each one can cost more than $10,000—and Lauren got out her breakfast of a green smoothie.
The best educators have a natural charisma; for whatever reason, you want to listen to them tell you things. Lauren has that charisma. She has long wavy hair, an encouraging smile, and a jaunty, caffeinated energy. There are 450 kids at the academy; Lauren doesn’t just know their names, she knows which ones are struggling in which classes, where they want to go to college, and who has recently had a “LaSalle,” the Noble slang for after-school detention. When she spots a student with detention—he didn’t do his homework—she doesn’t admonish him. She tells him that she’s looking forward to spending the afternoon together. He smiles in relief.
The Noble Network of schools is high-performing because of its No Excuses culture, which instills a sense of self-discipline and accountability in its students. Although elements of this approach are controversial—if a student receives more than thirteen demerits during the school year, the student has to attend a “character development” class that costs $140—the success of the Noble Network is not. (In 2015, the Noble Network was named the best charter school system in America by the Broad Foundation.) “It all starts with culture,” Lauren says. “Before you can do anything else, you have to give students a sense of responsibility. It’s learning how to do your homework every night. How to respect your classmates. How to pay attention. These are foundational skills, and they’re the foundation of the success of the Noble culture.”
But what the ACT ceiling and low college graduation rate revealed is that the focus on discipline is necessary but not sufficient, at least if you want students to reach their full potential. “We were really good at giving students the skills to deal with familiar material,” Lauren says. “But I think what the [ACT] ceiling showed us is that that’s not enough. If you don’t give them the skills to also deal with the unfamiliar, if you don’t teach them how to be curious, then you’re doing them a real disservice.”
The Noble Academy was an attempt to combine that No Excuses culture with the Harkness method, which engages students by confronting them with questions. “In real life, you don’t get the answers served up to you,” Lauren says. “You get problems, which you have to solve with your peers.” Lauren then puts her hand on the Harkness table. “This table is what a staff meeting looks like. It’s what a board meeting looks like. It’s what a lot of college classes look like. We’re preparing you for those places.”
Lauren leans forward in her chair; her voice gets quieter, as if she’s about to tell me a secret. “Everyone in education likes to use the word rigorous. But what does it mean? What people usually mean is that something is ‘hard,’ so you’re a rigorous school if you give out lots of bad grades.” She shakes her head in dismay. Lauren then begins sketching two invisible lines with her fingers. “Imagine a graph with two axes. One axis is risk and the other is ambiguity. So you’ve got this corner here”—she points to the bottom left quadrant—“which is low risk and low ambiguity. That’s a math class where you just give the kids the algorithm and they plug and chug. There’s no ambiguity and no risk because the teacher knows exactly what she wants. She’s got the Platonic ideal of an answer in her head and is pushing the kids to that end.”
Lauren then touches the top right corner of her imaginary graph. “What we aim for here is this: high risk and high ambiguity. For us, that’s what it means to be rigorous. It means giving the students material that is hard and complex and trusting them to find their own way, to take risks and make mistakes and learn from them.” It seems logical that the academy’s curriculum might help students build a set of soft skills, such as self-esteem and public speaking. Lauren, though, knew the academy would be judged by the same metric as every other public school: standardized test scores. “That’s the game our kids have to play,” she says. “You can complain about it, you can scream about the unfairness of it all, how they don’t get tutors or any help, but they need that score, otherwise no college is going to give them a chance. That score is what sets them up for a life rich with options.”
Most public schools respond to the pressures of standardized testing by teaching to the test, drilling students on the most likely answers. The students practice multiple-choice exams and follow a strict curriculum. Why bother with ambiguity when the tests are so literal? Curiosity is a luxury they can’t afford.
The Noble Academy is proof that there’s a better way. Although their curriculum does not teach to the test—it pretty much does the exact opposite—the academy has seen the largest growth in student scores in the entire Chicago public school system. Among ninth and eleventh graders, Noble Academy students are in the 98th and 97th percentile for “student growth” based on their PSAT and SAT scores.4 The academy consistently has one of the highest ACT scores of any nonselective school in Chicago, with a college enrollment rate above 91 percent.5
Lauren’s explanation for this remarkable improvement is rooted in the benefits of mystery: “When you teach kids to be excited about hard questions, when you teach them that not knowing the answer is something to embrace, then you are also giving them a crucial skill for testing. What normally happens when a student sees something on a test they’re unfamiliar with is that they freeze and panic. They don’t know how to deal. But I think because our kids are used to ambiguity, they find it a little exciting, so they’re more willing to tackle those problems first.”
It’s a training we need. As Lauren notes, ambiguity and uncertainty are inescapable facts of life, and not just on the SAT. “If you have a high-powered job, then you’re going to be faced with situations you’ve never seen before,” she says. “There’s no rule book you can follow. You’re going to have to know how to handle problems that are new and maybe a little scary.”
The Noble Academy teaches students how to think about the unknown. By making ambiguous material a central feature of the curriculum, the school shows them that ambiguity isn’t just frightening—it’s also what makes the classroom such an interesting place, giving rise to all sorts of unpredictable conversations. It’s the mystery that keeps us engaged. “We want students to always be at the edge of what they know,” Lauren says. “If we can teach them to push themselves, to go to the place where it’s going to feel challenging and mysterious, then we’re teaching them more than just something to remember for a test. We’re teaching them how to keep getting better, no matter where they are or what they do.”
Lauren then tells me a story about a senior named Danny. “Danny took a practice [math] SAT and bombed it. And he’s a really high performer, so I was like, ‘Danny, what happened?’ And it turned out that he’d found a hard math problem, one he’d never seen before, and was just really determined to figure it out. He eventually did, but then he had no time left for all the easy questions.” Lauren smiles. “That’s the monster I created, you know? But as monsters go, I’ll take it. We can teach them a few testing hacks. What’s much harder to teach is the confidence that comes from dealing with difficult and ambiguous material all day long.”
After talking with Lauren, I get a chance to wander around the academy, dropping in on classes to observe the Harkness method in action. I watch students in an AP Environmental Science class working together to assign trophic levels to various animals; when they run into problems, they don’t bother Ms. Hanson—they turn to each other and Google. In AP Government, taught by Ms. Traubert, the students were engaging in a line-by-line “translation” of the US Constitution in their Harkness groups. One table was trying to make sense of article I, section 9, which prevents the government from outlawing the slave trade but never uses the word slave. (“You can tell they’re embarrassed about slavery because they won’t say it,” says one of the students.) Another table was struggling with why the founding fathers kept suspending the civil rights of anyone “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” “These guys were just rebels, and now they’re like, ‘If you do what we did, you�
�ll have no rights,’ ” says a senior named Minerva. “But I guess that’s what happens when you get the power.”
In AP Calculus, the students worked on a word problem featuring Pascal’s triangle. When some of the students got stuck and asked Mr. Rothgeb for help, he didn’t give them the answer, or even a useful hint. Instead, he pretended that he didn’t know either. Lauren refers to this as “modeling vulnerability” and says it’s an important way for teachers to show students the fun of mystery and experimentation. “When I teach my math class, I like to put up a hard problem and tell the kids that I can’t solve it, so let’s do it together,” Lauren says. “That gives you a chance to praise the process, and not just the end result. When we snap”—group snapping is how Noble students applaud one another—“it’s never because someone got it correct. We snap because someone is willing to share how they got it wrong, or because they’re willing to stand up in front of their friends and give it a shot.”
There’s empirical proof for the effectiveness of this technique.6 In the psychology literature, it’s called the self-explanation effect, and it results from giving students the freedom to generate answers and explanations for themselves, even if it takes longer and leads to mistakes along the way. (The alternative is “instructor scripted” education, in which teachers don’t just give their students the questions—they also tell them how to solve them.) For instance, in a study of the self-explanation effect among third, fourth, and fifth graders, students who got the wrong answer to a math problem were encouraged to “think of a new way to solve the problem.”7 If they still couldn’t figure it out, they were shown a wrong answer by another child and asked to explain why it also was incorrect. They were never given the solution by the adult—their struggle was part of the lesson. According to a recent meta-analysis of sixty-nine experiments, self-explanation is a “powerful intervention,” capable of enhancing learning across a wide range of subjects, from algebra to reading comprehension.8