Seminar

Seminar #1 -- Hume -- 10/7/2008

Brandon, the only participant whom I actually know, began the seminar by asking, "What did you get out of it?" Brandon was in our (Darrell and I) learning community last fall, so he has some experience with seminars. He's also, generally, a smart guy and interested in the material. He's a good student because he doesn't put a lot of ego into his learning. He's not afraid of not getting it right. He'll put himself out there and try to explore and learn.

Darrell told me that the seminar went well, by his standards, and I agreed. The first thing I noticed was that students began, and stayed very close to the original text, quoting or referring to the source material at least 10 times during the seminar. I'd like to observe a regular lecture class and count the number of direct references to the text under those circumstances.

Moreover, it appeared to me that students really were operating on a higher-level, in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy, as they clarified, explained, synthesized, and evaluated the course material. They were not at all concerned with summary details, although, this might be a good place for them to start, the basic outline of the essay and Hume's argument. There seemed to be some reiteration of material they had already covered, most notably the idea of "secret powers." Finally, Darrell explained this to them, and, actually, according to Darrell, it was really one student who was held up by this concept. The student was missing Hume's tone, that he was saying "secret powers" slightly tongue-in-cheek. The misconception about tone is difficult, and entirely understandable. This is probably one of the most diffcult things for students to identify, which is why satire is difficult for them :)

I also noticed a student draw upon his learning from Anthropology -- patterns of ______! I can't recall the term, and I didn't write the specific term down in my notes, but this was beautiful. There's always a problem with transference of knowledge from one domain to another.

I also spoke with Karen about her seminars. She noted that in her seminars, her students reported feeling badly for not coming to class prepared for seminar. She uses the same seminars groups throughout the semester, which seems to be important, because then students feel a sense ofresponsibility to one another. It's funny, as teachers, we try everything to get students to come to class prepared, but in the end, grades, shame, rational arguments seem to have little impact, but if it's the pressure comes from peers, they feel badly, and this motivates them to complete the work.

I think I should survey seminar students regarding their thoughts about the effectiveness of seminars.

Ideally, I should get together with Barb and see if she can help me put together a survey that relies on a Likert scale, rather than a qualitative survey -- easier to analyze the data :)