Here's How To Do The Seminar

 

Reflections and Reactions on the article “The Seminar” by Michael Kahn

Honey Dounnyl C. Garsuta

At the onset of the article, the author made emphasis the reason why students come to college. Not because of the professors but because of the educational journey they will undergo with the other students. That it is in the presence of other people similarly searching for understanding that discourse and real interaction and great learning happen.

It is amazingly new to me that teachers aren’t important inside the classroom and learners just need real conversation to get the learning done. They need to talk to people about their reading assignment and talk about their thoughts and what they are wondering about. For me, this is new because I used to have the thought of having a teacher as the source of knowledge.

The article talked about the four different styles of intellectual conversation enriching a seminar experience. The FREE-FOR-ALL,  The BEAUTY CONTEST, The DISTINGUISHED HOUSE TOUR, and The BARN RAISING.

Somewhere in our memory, the image of barn raising evokes – energy, cooperation, productivity, and community, it is the barn-raising spirit we needed more than ever. If we only adopt this style in any of our sessions, our learners today are given an opportunity in building our collective future – both the teacher and the learners. This is indeed a great idea than just having The FREE-FOR-ALL and The BEAUTY CONTEST styles.

Great ideas are not uncommon, one of the greatest challenges these ideas face is follow through and execution. The article gives us the idea that we teachers need to feel this certain emotion – wake up! Wake up from having a boring lecture-type or a one-way demonstration of knowledge and skills to the learners as if they are blank slates.

Of course, dialogue is relevant to many other aspects of our lives in fact it's a life skill. In the article, it’s not just dialogue, it could be trialogue or multilogue - is a key for work in education so in this, we mean it is not just talking it's actually understanding a situation or an idea from somebody else's point of view so it's about being open-minded and creating spaces for other people to talk at some length making us listen respectfully responding to the idea, making reasoning explicit bringing together and synthesizing ideas as well. What makes us feel anxious about this is that we need to be careful when it happens to their ideas against other perspectives. Where right or wrong, good or not so good comes into the conversation. Because this just makes the idea-discussing difficult to facilitate.

The end of reading this article, makes me ponder how mathematics must be learned, bringing the right “seminar” type into my classroom. Gives me the real reason why I need to take up this course. And be careful about giving respect to my students’ ideas along with their participation in the discussions.