PARTICIPATING IN SEMINARS

SOME INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS PREPARED FOR STUDENTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES AND ENGLISH CLASSES

Some Introductory Comments Prepared for Students in Liberal Studies and English Classes

[This document, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island University) for use in Liberal Studies and English classes, is in the public domain and may be used by anyone in whole or in part, without permission and with charge, released July 1998, revised slightly May 2001 and again in December 2002 and May 2017]

A seminar is a small group of people (usually less than 20) who meet to discuss together a particular subject. It is, first and foremost, a conversation among people who share a common interest in expanding their understanding of idea, a book, a painting, or some other specific topic.

The seminar session has a number of specific purposes. First, it is designed to create a situation where the participants share their views about something very specific, so that everyone's understanding of that focus is expanded, improved, and deepened. Second, a seminar seeks to promote the skills of conversation, a complex set of habits and attitudes which, in large part, determine our abilities to deal with others in a group setting. And finally, a seminar tries to foster an ongoing discussion that will continue outside the classroom (in the cafeteria, over dinner, in a pub).

In the setting of an educational institution, the rationale for seminar-style learning rests on the well-known fact that students learn far more from talking and listening to each other than they do from listening passively to a lecturer. And, more importantly, they remember what they learn in a seminar far better than they do with lectures. In addition, the seminar seeks to enrich the student’s social experiences at the institution, to make sure people have the best opportunity for forming friendships of various kinds and for discovering others with whom they can carry on meaningful conversations (and not just about school work).

Successful seminars, however, do not just happen. Because of the complex nature of the social interactions, those participating have to work to create and sustain a conversational setting in which, individually and collectively, the aims of the seminar are realized as fully as possible. This demand requires from each of the participants a continuing commitment to making the enterprise work.

THE GROUND RULES FOR A SEMINAR

While a seminar, like a conversation, is in many respects a good deal more relaxed and free-wheeling than, say, a lecture, it does nevertheless have some unwritten rules. Participants need to be aware of these in order to understand the procedures and responsibilities of all seminar participants.

1. The seminar is, above all, a gathering of equals. That means that everyone has an equal right to be heard and an equal responsibility for keeping the seminar working properly. While the seminar will normally have a leader, usually the instructor (although she may delegate the position), that leader is one among equals. The leader’s duties usually involve getting the seminar started, occasional prompting, if necessary, and winding things up at the end. Beyond that, however, the leader has no particular duty greater than anyone else’s for keeping the conversation going in a useful manner. Hence, if you are experiencing some problems in the seminar, the first question to consider is this: What can you, as an equal member of the group, do to help remedy the situation?

2. Seminars should be informal, but also polite. That is, people’s views should be treated with respect (which does not mean that they cannot be challenged), and the normal courtesies of polite conversation should be observed. If there is a breach of such politeness, each member of the group has the responsibility for pointing it out and helping to remedy it. It is important to remember that courtesy is not just a matter of verbal niceties. One’s courtesy also manifests itself in one’s tone, bodily posture, and particular activities while someone else is speaking, so that things like slouching, sitting away from the table, eating, knitting, yawning, attending to email messages, and so on can affect the discussion for the worse.

3. A seminar conversation involves everyone at the table. Therefore, remarks are directed to all participants, not just to the leader of the seminar or to any other person in particular.

4. While seminars have no predetermined structure, they usually have a very specific focus (a text, a particular part of a text, a single issue). Hence, the business of the seminar is to stay on that focus. Digressions are not unusual (and sometimes useful), but often they need to be controlled and, if necessary, ended, so that the attention of the participants may direct itself once again onto the specific focus (e.g., a particular part of the text under discussion). Here again, all participants have an equal responsibility for dealing with any problems of this sort.

HOW TO BE A GOOD SEMIANR PARTICIPANT

Participating well in seminars is not easy. Most students require a good deal of practice in order to improve significantly. The following points should help you to focus your attention on some things directly relevant to good seminar participation.

1. To begin with there are some obvious basic points. Participants should arrive on time and stay for the length of the seminar (interruptions are irritating, and missing part of the conversation can lead to repetition). You should have the correct text with you in the proper edition (working with different translations or with editions having different page numbers can make providing references difficult and slow down the process). Participants should also attend carefully to what is going on, ready to contribute and displaying interest in the proceedings. You should not use the seminar as your lunch hour (i.e., by bringing in something to eat while others are speaking) or as an opportunity to catch up on some sleep, to write a few emails to your relatives, or to complete an assignment for another class.

2. Seminars require preparation. To be a good seminar participant you need to have read the material (preferably more than once) and to have thought about it. You should be bringing to the meeting some considered reflections about the topic under discussion, perhaps even some notes you have jotted down. It is particularly irritating for those who have so prepared themselves to have to listen to someone who has not read the material but who wishes to deliver a series of opinions on it anyway or who needs to be told the story line or the argument. One of the best ways to prepare well for a seminar is to meet with one or two people beforehand to discuss the material (perhaps over lunch or the evening before).

3. In preparing for the seminar, think carefully about the lead-in focus question, if there is one. You might jot down a couple of points you could raise in connection with it. In addition, as you read the assigned text, make a note of anything you find really puzzling or irritating or exciting, something that might form the basis for a question or comment you would want to ask the seminar participants to respond to. You might like also to think about any useful comparisons with other books or characters from other books which you might like to introduce. You do not have to come to the seminar with your mind absolutely made up about the text under discussion (that’s probably not a good idea). But you should bring a record detailing some aspects of your engagement with the text. You might not get to use these, but you should have them available.

4. The most difficult and important skill in effective seminar participation is good listening. You need to attend carefully to what others are saying. And then you need to learn to respond intelligently and helpfully. A seminar is not just a collection of individual points of view declared one after the other. It has a rhythm, often an unpredictable rhythm, which is established, above all, by the ways in the which the participants respond to each other. If someone’s contribution is puzzling, then ask him to continue, taking care of a particular trouble you have with a point he raised. If the contribution is very good, tell the speaker so. If you disagree or have an alternative point, then put that on the table. As in a conversation, in a seminar the participant has to be prepared to be flexible, adjusting her participation to what is happening moment by moment throughout the seminar. This is the major challenge of the process.

5. Participants need to be careful of interrupting someone else before he is finished. This habit can close some participants down so that they are reluctant to contribute. By the same token, participants should recognize that they have the responsibility for keeping the discussion focused on the matter at hand. Thus, you should, when necessary, challenge the relevance and the direction of certain remarks. Just because you need to be polite does not mean you cannot be firm in requesting a return to the main point or to a previous point which has been abandoned too quickly.

6. It is entirely appropriate in a seminar to decline to respond if someone asks you a direct question. If you have nothing relevant to say on the point, there is no need to pretend. Simply decline the invitation, and let the seminar continue.

7. Good seminar participation does not depend upon the frequency or length of one's remakrs. In fact, the person who is always ready to jump in at the slightest opportunity or whose opinions are delivered at great length can often harm a seminar, first, by excluding others and, second, by encouraging others to rely on her to pick up any slack moments. Hence, you should constantly assess the nature of your contributions. Are you speaking up too much? Do you tend to make very long comments? Is the group getting to depend upon you too much? In this regard, you need to consider what one might call one's conversational trigger finger. This phrase refers to the time people take to re act to a question or to someone else's point. Some people react very quickly and are ready to jump in with their views almsot immediately; other people need some time to reflect on how they are going to repond. If those with a quick conversational trigger finger take over, then the others rarely get a chance to speak up, because by the time they are ready the subject has shifted to something else. So you need to assess how you, in your keeness to respond, may be closing out someone whose reaction time is slower than your own. If you have already spoken a few times, try delaying your next entry into the conversation, setting up a pause which may invite someone who has not yet spoken to say something.]

8. It is particularly important for good seminar participation that you remain alert to the group dynamics in the seminar. For example, some people find it difficult to speak. Perhaps you could invite them to state their views on something, encourage them to pursue a point they have just introduced, or encourage them in some way to join in. The best participants in seminars are those who not only provide interesting and relevant comments themselves but also actively encourage others to join in.

9. Finally, a good seminar participant will reflect upon the nature of her seminar activities, paying particular attention to any habits she is falling into. Are you always sitting in the same chair? Do you always speak up early? Do you have one particular form of comment which you always use? How much time do you usually take to make a point (are you too brief or too long-winded)? And so on. To derive the best learning from the seminar experience, you should learn to experiment with different styles. For example, if you like to speak up and generally do so quite early, try for a couple of sessions not saying anything too early on, reserving what you have to say until later. If you are by nature someone who initiates the discussion by putting new points on the table, why not try for a few sessions being reactive, that is, taking your cue from points others have raised. If you usually offer only brief remarks, take a chance on expanding your views. If you are by nature quite talkative and like to offer long comments, think about trying a more concise approach as an experiment.

SOME PROBLEMS WHICH CAN ARISE

Because seminars are in many respects unstructured and the power is distributed equally among the participants, certain problems can arise. As mentioned before, these problems belong to all participants, and it is thus the responsibility of everyone to remain alert to them and to work at mitigating them, if they do arise.

1. Certain people find putting their own comments into the discussion very difficult and thus tend to remain quiet for the entire seminar, often repeating the process in every seminar. If you are one of these people, you should really try to break your silence. Often a good way to do that is to prepare an answer to the focus question or raise some issues about it in advance and then put your view on the table immediately, before the conversation gets up a full head of steam. Alternatively, you might at some point ask someone to explain a point further, because there is something about it you do not understand. Remember that the seminar is the best educational opportunity you are going to have to learn to speak up; you are among friends and peers, and there is no threat in the situation. So make the most of it, even if you have to force yourself the first few times. Beyond this, those who do not find speaking up a problem have a responsibility for encouraging those that do. If there are people who never speak at all, then everyone is the seminar is failing in some way.

2. A different problem can arise from people who talk too much, who insist on taking up more than their share of the common time. Here again the best solution to this is some self-assessment and self-control. However, if the situation gets out of hand, it is entirely appropriate for someone to point out to the participant that he is taking up too much of the time (perhaps a private word first, rather than as a general group comment). The same is true for people who constantly speak up with irrelevant digressions, taking the attention away from the specific focus of the discussion. Everyone has the duty to pull the discussion back.

3. Absenteeism can be a major problem. A seminar is a social process, and it will not work properly unless all the participants are all there most of the time. This is especially the case when the participants all know each other very well. Hence, missing a seminar is not just a personal loss for you; it deprives everyone in the group. The situation is quite different here from the normal lecture situation. Seminar-style learning places a very high priority on attendance.

4. If there are serious problems, like severe clashes of personality, which you feel are inappropriate to bring up in front of the entire group, then you should talk to the seminar leader (instructor) as soon as possible. You should never continue to participate in a seminar with concealed feelings of frustration or anger. The instructor may be able to do something to help you. Often it may be helpful to talk the matter over with someone else in the seminar first.

GRADING SEMINAR PARTICIPATION

If an instructor assigns a significant portion of the final grade for a course to seminar participation, it is particularly important that she has a detailed method for marking seminar participation, one which takes into account every seminar during the semester. It is extremely unwise and often unfair for an instructor to base the final participation mark on some overall end-of-semester impression of a how a particular student has fared over the past several weeks. The instructor, in other words, should have some clear written evidence available, should a student decide to challenge the mark he has received for participating in a number of seminars during the semester.

Where seminar participation receives a mark, the criteria the instructor considers include, above all, the following points (which should be obvious from the above remarks):

— preparation for the seminar (Did the student have the book? Did the student read the book and come to the seminar prepared to focus on the particular issues of the day?);

— quality of the participant’s contributions to the discussion (Did the student contribute some relevant and intelligent questions, answers, doubts about matters arising in the discussion? Were the remarks relevant? Did any of the remarks challenge the participants in useful ways?);

— nature of the participant’s interaction with others (Did the student listen well? Did he encourage others to speak up? Did he ask useful questions or offer helpful follow-up remarks to keep the flow of the conversation polite and relevant?);

 —some negative points: excessive digressions; verbal or non-verbal hostility, indifference, boredom, ridicule; over-eagerness to contribute; refusal to put any views on the table.

A SAMPLE MARKING SYSTEM

The following paragraphs describe the marking system widely used at one point in Liberal Studies at Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo (now Vancouver Island University). These remarks are merely a suggested method for those wondering about how to assign marks for seminar participation when that is required.

After each seminar the instructor assigns each student a mark (out of 6). This mark does not indicate a fixed scale, but it does rank the students relative to each other (hence a mark of, say, 4, does not indicate 66 percent). The instructor does this as soon as possible after the seminar while the experience is still fresh in her memory. It is obviously a bad idea for the instructor to make notes during the seminary about contributions from the students.

The instructor each week also collects seminar notes (a short response to the work assigned and prepared by each student before the seminar discussion) and marks each one (once again, out of 6). As before, this is not an exact mark but an indication of the ranking of the notes relative to other notes.

Since the mark out of 6 is not a fixed-scale mark but an indication of relative ranking for that seminar, students cannot at once convert a total of such marks to a percentage equivalent. In most seminar-based courses, the instructor should give students an interim report on participation and seminar notes about half-way through the semester, so that the students have a more precise idea of how the marks they have been receiving translate into a percentage equivalent and a letter grade.

At the end of the semester, the instructor will add up all the marks for all the seminars and seminar notes and calculate the average mark (out of 6). The marks will then be listed in descending order.

The instructor will then assign a mark to the highest average, depending on her assessment of the contribution made by that student during the entire semester. This mark will normally be in the A or A+ range. The instructor will then assign a mark to the lowest average. This mark will usually be in the C to C- range. On the basis of this differential the instructor will then assign a mark to all the other averages in the list.

An absence from seminar or a missing seminar note earns a mark of 0, and there is no way a student can make up for this missing work. Thus, students should note very, very carefully that in this scheme missing several seminars or seminar notes can really lower the final average and therefore the mark assigned to it. Even if your participation in seminars is very good, missing many seminars or seminar notes can result in a very low mark.

 
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