Harkness - Phillips Exeter Academy

How you'll learn

At Exeter, Harkness is more than a way to learn. It’s a way of life. It starts in the classroom and extends to field, stage and common spaces.

It’s a simple idea.

Edward Harkness believed learning should be collaborative. Twelve students and one teacher sit around an oval table and discuss the subject at hand. What could be simpler?

What happens at the table, however, is a “real revolution,” as Harkness envisioned nearly a hundred years ago. It’s where you explore ideas as a group and develop the courage to speak, the compassion to listen and the empathy to understand.

It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s a collaborative approach to problem solving and learning. Students are empowered to take control of their own learning, and every voice carries equal weight.

Harkness learning is like learning through a conversation.

Eveland '25

Watch a Harkness discussion

Take a virtual seat at the table as Exeter students unpack a poem (“Undercurrent,” by Katrina Roberts) in a staged, though totally unpracticed, Harkness discussion demonstration for brand-new students.

You'll love to learn

A lot of students feel like they have to know things before they come into the classroom, and I love when they discover that it's OK to not know things — that's actually why we're here.
Ms. Ullah, instructor in English

Lauren '26 talks about the discoveries she has made through discussion at the Harkness table.

Explore how the Exeter classroom and Harkness has evolved over the course of the Academy's history.

Exeter taught me to speak my mind: I didn’t understand the degree to which the Harkness method was unusual, how everyone participates, but that has absolutely been my approach to my career, and what I now take into my own classes.
Heather Cox Richardson ’80, historian an professor at Boston College

Building a better classroom

Harkness tables are built according to the original 90-year old copyrighted and patented design, developed by philanthropist Edward Harkness. The standard size of the traditional oval Harkness table is 7 feet wide and 11 feet long, with seating for 12 students and one teacher.

“I had not suspected that a merely physical change in the classroom could so influence our work as it has done,” observed instructor Henry S. Couse during the first term of Harkness teaching in 1931. “Sitting in a group about a table instead of in formal rows of seats has abolished almost completely the stiff duality which used to obtain between instructor and class. … Now, there is a freedom of discussion, an eagerness to participate, that I never saw before, the value of which to both student and instructor is incalculable. And it comes mostly from sitting about a table.”

Today, every Exeter classroom and many common areas are adorned with our iconic table.

Three students in discussion around a Harkness table

Teacher sits with student reviewing papers

Harkness table full of students with books in the center

The man behind the plan

Edward Harkness’ experiences at St. Paul’s School and at Yale shaped his thinking about education. Not a natural student, he struggled to maintain his grades and to adjust to the competitive environments at both institutions. When considering making a large donation to Exeter, he told his friend and Exeter Principal Lewis Perry that a “conference method” of teaching fostered real learning, not a setting “where the teacher is on a platform raised above the pupils and there is a class of 20 or more boys who recite lessons.” He added to Perry, “get up a scheme, I’ll give you all the money you need to put it into operation.”

In 1930, Harkness donated $5.8 million (the equivalent of $129 million today) to the Academy, and Perry set out to put the benefactor’s vision to practice. As for Harkness, whose father was an early investor in Standard Oil, he gave away more than $2.4 billion in today’s dollars before his death in 1940.

More about Edward Harkness

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