Center for Faculty Development and Innovation

Workshop:

Strategies for Running a Successful Seminar

Sponsored by SIUE Honors Program

Date:

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Eric W. Ruckh (Historical Studies)

Teaching seminars are challenging. Because they are organized around student questions and discussion of complex texts, they are necessarily improvisational. Preparing for them and leading them require a different approach and set of strategies than using lecture focused strategies.

This faculty development workshop will provide faculty with practical strategies for successfully designing a course as a seminar or incorporating seminar discussions into a course. For students to succeed in a seminar, it is important that they learn how to use discussion to develop and advance rational, evidence based arguments. To do so, they and faculty have to know how to ask particular types of questions and to listen.

We will explore a number of strategies to cultivate those capacities: image theatre, guided dicussion, silent class, and fishbowl. The workshop will allow faculty time to work on syllabi and deploy these techniques into course design. The workshop will also highlight some of the unique resources of the FALC (The Foster Adaptive Learning Classroom).