Why Seminar is the Best Teaching Method for High School Students
In my first year teaching, I tried to prepare meaningful lectures every day for my students because I believed that my primary job was to communicate all the knowledge that I had on a given topic. After a few weeks of writing new lectures every evening, I realized that, despite my very best attempts, the students were disengaged and uninterested in listening to me drone on for over 30 minutes every class. Although my first lectures went over well, I was unable to keep the students engaged and interested just with my own rhetorical power over the school year.
I also found the pace of writing lectures to be totally overwhelming and exhausting. Writing meaningful lectures every night, as well as grading, and preparing exams was simply too much for anyone to handle. So I did what many teachers do and I began to use pre-made lesson plans and teaching scripts to lighten the load. While this lightened the preparation burden, I still found that the students rarely found the material interesting or personally compelling. This was especially true in Theology class where, despite everything I did, the students could not see the relevance and beauty of the subject. It remained a mildly interesting but mostly irrelevant school subject. I was not satisfied and thought that there had to be a better way of approaching high school teaching.
It was a few years later that I finally saw a well-run socratic seminar at a local charter school. The students were reading the Nicomachean Ethics and doing exactly what I always dreamed my students would do: carefully analyzing the text, assessing the truth of the claims, arguing points fervently, listening to others with humility, and recognizing the relevance of the claims on their own lives. There was a drama and a purpose to the class that I had never seen before. I became convinced then and there that the best method for teaching contemporary high school students is a well-structured seminar.
Since then, I have visited many more classrooms and spent a great deal of time considering the best teaching approaches and methods and it has only reinforced my view that there is no better teaching method for contemporary high school students.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll give three reasons why schools should implement seminars in their classrooms.
1. We Learn By Doing, and that Includes Speaking Well and Thinking!
Despite claims that the modern tech-heavy classrooms are more “student-centered,” most are in fact governed by a cycle of content delivery, memorization, and recitation back to the teacher or device. Students spend hours in classes where they either watch PowerPoint presentations or passively respond to digital prompts. Most classrooms, sadly, are stale, boring, and disengaging. Why then are we shocked that high school graduates are increasingly unable to speak, read, or make cogent arguments? Frankly, it does not surprise me at all that most students are entering college unable to do some of the most basic academic tasks. We learn by doing and practicing and students have spent the past two decades in classrooms where they are not practicing or doing much of anything except passively listening.
In a well-run seminar, on the other hand, students learn and practice constantly exactly what we want them to do as free men and women: read, speak, write, and argue well. Students learn these things not because teachers give them endless lessons about reading strategies or tips to win arguments them but because, in seminar, these things form their daily and integrated practice. They are brought into real reading, real conversation, and real thought every day.
The comment that every visitor to SJI makes about our graduates is how mature and engaged they are in conversation. As I have been told many times, they seem like “adults.” The reason for this is that they practice daily, and with coaching, not only how to debate and score points but how to engage in meaningful conversation (the Latin etymological root of conversation is “to turn toward another”) about beautiful, good, and true things.
2. Seminar Helps Students Overcome Anxiety
When students enter SJI, the first poem they read together is Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” The students read it aloud and then the teacher asks them two questions: Who is the speaker? When is this happening?
And then…Silence. No one speaks. The students wait for the teacher to buckle under the pressure of silence and elaborate what he means, give some hints, or even start to answer the questions. But the teacher never does. He sits in silence and waits. Finally, a tentative and slightly quivering voice pipes up and declares: “well, I think the speaker is…” and then the seminar is off. The teacher will insert himself throughout the conversation but the task is to place the burden of thinking and speaking on the students. But the students are silent, usually, not because they are not thinking anything but because they are afraid. Afraid of being wrong, afraid of looking foolish, afraid of what their peers might think of them.
Every time a student makes a daring argument, every time he offers his own thoughts to be considered by his peers, he is practicing courage. What attends courage always is humility. True humility does not mean slavishness or subservience but rather the recognition of real weakness and a confidence that God has provided one with the assistance one needs. That assistance, for the humble man, comes through correction. The humble student–the one who is comfortable knowing he is inadequate–dares to speak and is grateful for any improvement or correction.
It is beautiful to see the students open up to each other in humility and begin to see that they are more capable of discovering the truth together than alone. They see that their classmates are not judges and competitors but co-operators in truth with whom they can dare great things.
In my experience, these two attendant virtues are critical for high schoolers to develop, especially those that are academically gifted. For such students, they often develop a a disordered pride which, curiously, manifests as anxiety, fear, and perfectionism. They simply cannot be wrong or perceived as insufficient. When that is the case, the only possible response is fear and anxiety because it is simply impossible to always be right or perfect. When they develop courage and humility, however, they are much more comfortable not only being wrong but having the courage to try and fail.
3. Good Seminars Cultivate Deep Friendship
Friendship is built around common loves. My sons' best friends are those that love baseball and playing endless games in the yard. They love to play and are bound together with their friends by that common love. Unfortunately, what often happens in schools is that there is little noble or good for the students to love together. In the absence of good and beautiful things to love, students bond over transient fads, various "identities," or gossip. Something will bind students together in friendship and the question is what exactly that will be in a school. It is not enough simply to present good objects, books, poetry, music, etc. but that thing has to be held and discussed in common. Only then can it become the bond that links students in friendship.
Plato and Aristotle were deeply aware of this truth and emphasized that true friendship can only occur when two people are bound together by the good. They are both quite explicit, in fact, in saying that real friendship occurs when we are in dialogue about the beautiful and good.
Sadly, many children and adolescents lack the opportunity to experience such friendships. Often, their friendships are mediated by advertising companies that exploit their relationships for the sake of profit. What we have found is that a good seminar helps students unite and bond over real things and questions. Since their friendships are rooted in something more than the latest meme, they tend to be more lasting and fulfilling. And this is exactly what our alumni tell us when we interview them, what they remember most about SJI is the deep and meaningful friendships that they developed around the common discussion. As one alumna recently told me, "At SJI, I felt like everything mattered and was important because we all cared about what conclusions we came to."
But this method is, in fact, the hardest for teachers to master. It is much easier to write a PowerPoint, have the students copy the material, and assess whether or not they remembered what they copied. It is even easier to purchase a teaching program online and guide the students through completing the digital assignments. And, in fact, you can proceed through material much more quickly using the traditional method. What does not happen with any regularity, however, in such a method is that the students internalize and come to know what is being taught; what does not happen is that students practice the virtue and habits we want them to develop; what does not happen is that students come to love what they learn.
Schools often abandon seminar teaching because it is hard to train teachers to do it well. I think this is a mistake. If we want to cultivate excellent men and women of virtue, enterprise, wisdom, and courage, then we have to invest in the methods that actually accomplish the task. I would be the first to admit that this is a lengthy process and, in many ways, quite inefficient. The difficulty, however, should not be sufficient reason to avoid doing what we know is best.
