Geography 640

Guidelines for Moderating a Seminar Discussion

Lucky you. You've just been assigned an evening to "moderate" the seminar. What does that mean? Your goal is to encourage discussion of key points made by the article and, perhaps more importantly for graduate students thinking ahead to their own theses, how the article went about its business.

With that overall goal, some critical points to look for systematically include:

• identifying the purpose statement
• identifying how the authors justify the importance of the study in terms of the literature
• identifying the data used in the study as original (primary), archival (secondary), or tertiary (using data published by someone else with who knows which errors)
• identifying how the data were collected
• identifying the methods used to process and then analyze the data
• what the results were
• what the authors state they mean
• how convincing and clear the article is to you
• in which way did the article make some kind of original contribution conceptually or methodologically?

Now, having figured all this out ahead of time, pick out several points (maybe six or eight) that you think everyone should take from the article. Include these methodological issues, but also pick out theoretical impressions that you want your peers to leave with, some big ideas in the topic area. Some of these will probably be in the introduction to the paper and should be in the discussion or conclusions as well.

Identifying all this is the basis for what happens in class afterward. Start the discussion in class, perhaps by asking one of these questions. Let people talk. Check off each point as they are addressed. As you know, people easily get off topic, sometimes following an interesting tangent or implication that leads off from one of the main points. That's okay, up to a point, and it might be a little frustrating when your peers don't immediately see everything the way you do.

While letting people share ideas, keep your attention on that sometimes subtle shift in focus when they are really going off topic and intervene from time to time to get people back on track. You're the boss: Break into the discussion and just ask people to comment on one of your next points.

Time management is important. About 45 minutes into it, check their progress through the points you wanted them to air. If you're not halfway through, decide on the fly if one or two points will have to be sacrificed or else try to speed them through what's left. Remember that you have only about 1:15.

The opposite problem could also come up: If everyone has efficiently slammed through everything "too fast," then what? Then, you start asking/improvising other questions just off the article main topic, getting people to consider how they're going to do their own theses.

Something else to pay attention to is the interpersonal dynamics of the discussion. Some people tend to get too wound up or too domineering and you start to see that they may be blocking someone else from saying something. Other people are very quiet, either too shy to cut in themselves ... or too lazy. Seminars, thus, can discriminate against quiet people ... and allow the lazy to hide behind the noisy ones. If you see this dynamic developing, cut in and draw a quiet person into the discussion, perhaps with a specific question to him or her. Try to make sure that everyone says at least one or two things in the course of the discussion of your article.

Now, the evening is over and you survived. Your work isn't over, though. Jot down notes about what was said in class. It will probably include a lot of things you hadn't thought of while reading the article and preparing to moderate its discussion (which is really one of the neat things about a seminar discussion!). It is important to get these down as soon as possible after the seminar ends, because your memory of the discussion will start to fade really fast. If possible, write down your impressions before you go to bed. Then, compose a couple of paragraphs or a list of bullet statements encapsulating all this and send it to everyone on e-mail as a debriefing. That way, we'll have "running lights" on things that happened in the seminar to reïnforce our memories of the big points.

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Last revised: 09/05/12
Dr. C.M. Rodrigue