Planning, Practice, and Assessment in the Seminar Classroom

• Published in: The High School journal 2006-10, Vol.90 (1), p.1-8
• Main Authors: Billings, Laura, Roberts, Terry
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behavior; Billing; Case Studies; Classroom management; Classroom techniques; Company business management; Company business planning; Dialogism; Grade 10; High school students; High schools; Interviews; Learning; Learning Processes; Learning Strategies; Lesson plans; Management; Methods; Murray, Lynne; Paideia; Planning; Prayer; Program Development; Program Evaluation; Questionnaires; Seminars; Student Surveys; Students; Teachers; Teaching Methods; Writing tests
• ISSN: 0018-1498; 1534-5157; 1534-5157
• DOI: 10.1353/hsj.2006.0009

The Paideia Seminar was first defined as part of philosopher Mortimer Adler's Paideia Program in "The Paideia Proposal" (1982) and two other books that followed ("Paideia Problems and Possibilities," 1983, and "The Paideia Program," 1984) shortly thereafter. From the beginning, this teaching and learning strategy was intended to be used as part of a systemic, transformational program that would eventually affect all aspects of a school community. More recently, the National Paideia Center has defined the Paideia Seminar as "a collaborative, intellectual dialogue facilitated with open-ended questions about a text," and stressed that it should enhance both the intellectual and social development of students. In this article, the authors described a case study wherein they collected data in the following ways: (1) Asking students to complete a questionnaire to identify talk preferences in whole class groups; (2) Interviewing Lynne Murray, the teacher, to establish a basic description of her approach to planning seminars; and (3) Interviewing Murray at the end of the semester and then again about six months after all of the classroom observations was completed. The most significant finding that the authors derived from the year-long study of the Paideia Seminar in Lynne Murray's classroom was that the seminars began to improve only when Murray focused considerable post-seminar time and energy on assessing what happened during the dialogue and then used the data gleaned from that assessment to deliberately plan the next seminar in the series. This cycle of planning, practice, and assessment involved both the teaching and learning process of the "seminar as well as its curricular content." This clear pattern led the authors to the following conclusion: that teaching practice only improves when it takes place consistently within a full Teaching Cycle of deliberate planning, careful practice, and thoughtful assessment.