Leading the Seminar Improving the way the seminar is conducted is just as important as improving the design. A distinction that seems to have been lost over the years is that lecture courses were taught, whereas seminars were led. A seminar is supposed to be less authoritarian and more collaborative than other courses. Cooperative learning models seem well-suited to this idea of seminar leadership. Cooperative techniques have been used successfully in undergraduate classes for years, and teachers who adapt these strategies for their graduate seminars are finding that their students also respond enthusiastically.
Some teachers also allow students a greater voice in deciding on the focus of the seminar.
To provide context, in the first seminar meeting the teacher describes the work being done in the field, outlines the more important questions and issues, and relates these questions to the discipline as a whole. Students read selected pieces to fill in the background and, in a class discussion, the teacher and students together select the specific issues the seminar will address. This approach allows students to choose areas that interest them most, but within parameters provided by the instructor. Joint academic authorship is common in many academic fields, and assigning collaborative research papers can teach valuable lessons about the benefits of scholarly cooperation as well as the difficulties involved. Pairs of students can research and write full-scale seminar papers or a series of shorter papers.