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Thinking About Thinking:
Havergal’s Latest Chair of Teaching and Learning Goes Deep
If Havergal encourages students to pursue their insatiable
curiosities, it only seems fair to give teachers the same
opportunity. That’s part of the idea behind Havergal’s
Gardiner Chair of Teaching and Learning, where teachers
are given time to explore a curriculum-related topic and
then report back to the community. For the past two years,
Havergal English teacher Laura McRae took on one of the
biggest topics you could imagine: thinking.
Thinking about thinking seems like a very meta exercise,
overflowing with possibilities. How do you even approach
it? Aware that there were already some great examples of
thinking going on at Havergal, McRae started by asking
those around her. “I ran a survey of students and teachers
about what kinds of teaching or classroom situations they
felt created the best thinking environments and why,”
McRae says. She then moved on to mixed-grade focus
groups with students from Grades 7 to 12 and sat in on
classrooms to see thinking in action.
Inspiration also came from reading about and observing
learning at other institutions. As examples, McRae points
to the Harkness method originated at Phillips Exeter
Academy, where students engage in conversation with
minimal teacher intervention and the exercises she
observed at Bard College in New York, where students
engage in a write-to-learn approach, whereby conversations
were enhanced through the practice of preliminary
writing exercises. “It became clear that matching the
conversational piece with a writing piece was incredibly
important to enriching the conversation,” says McRae.
Students also cited conversational classrooms as a source
of rich thinking at Havergal. “Students talking to each other
was, overwhelmingly, where students saw learning and
thinking happening,” McRae says of her survey. Class size
was also important. “Not too small and not too large, so
they had enough ideas, but not too many,” she adds.
McRae notes that a focus on thinking can be one of the
best ways to challenge students. “One of my students
said that you can always do the knowledge piece, you can
always do more research and you can always check your
commas. But thinking, you never know exactly when you
start and you never know exactly when you stop. That
makes it both the scariest and the most exciting part of any
project because it’s what gives you the most excitement,
yet it’s the part where you feel the most exposed.”
SPRING 2017•
TORCH
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