Trio Seminar

One format that I've found to promote accountability as well as high levels of participation is the trio seminar. This one sort of came to me one day as I was struggling to get my senior English class to effectively-engage in the traditional whole-class seminar (you know, the one with everyone circled up and nervously starting at each other and dominated by three or four students!).

While I suspected that there were more students who had something of significance to contribute, they didn't have the courage to offer their ideas in this large circle, they were content to let others do the talking for them, or (and this one is most disheartening), they would--under pressure grade-wise to contribute something--offer a shallow observation that had most likely been floated ten or fifteen minutes before by another student.

So, one evening, I dreamed up this seating chart:

And here is how it works. All the tables are pushed against the classroom walls. Each of the squares represents a student chair. Each trio of chairs is numbered (Trio 1, Trio 2, Trio 3, etc.). The students walk in and find their name and trio number which I have projected on the screen. (A note on trio selections: sometimes they are randomly-selected, other times they are purposely-grouped.)

Depending on time of the year and goals for the seminar, either I or the students will generate discussion questions/topics. Students are numbered 1, 2, 3 in their trio groups, and they take turns leading three- to five-minute mini-discussions. I stand in the middle, clipboard in hand, and take notes as I listen in to the ten or eleven simultaneous conversations. While the seating chart above shows eight groupings, I've had as many as 14 in one of my larger classes.

The benefit of this simultaneous chatter is just that--at any given time, a third of the class is talking in a more intimate setting. They get a chance to test their ideas, build deeper understanding, learn from their trio partners--which helps not only helps them refine their thinking, thus improving the quality of their conversation, it emboldens them for the next, whole class round.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, all students turn their chairs so that we form a large whole-class circle and proceed in a more traditional Socratic seminar format. But, as I quickly discovered with that class of seniors, the level of engagement is immensely improved, as is the level of confidence, the contributions, and the number of contributors.

For these reasons and more, this is one of my favorite seminar formats.

For some thoughts on assessing the first segment when it is humanly impossible to hear everything, I have a few ideas to help. You can contact me or wait for an upcoming post on using Google forms for seminar data collection.

Thanks for reading,
Steve

For an idea about how to streamline seminar assessment, you might want to check out this post on using Google Docs for self-assessing, peer assessing, and teacher assessing seminars of any structure.