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The student and tutor guide to getting the most from philosophy seminars

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This guide has been put together as a resource for both students and tutors to help everyone get the most out of seminars. Some material relates to the tutor running the seminar and some to helping the student, but all of it could be useful to both. Much of the advice available in 'how to …' books is geared to tutors, which makes it seem that the success or otherwise of a seminar is down to the capabilities of the tutor. However, what emerged from focus group work with students at Lancaster is that students are well aware that when seminars are not productive it is not necessarily due to the tutor, but rather the students not having the skills, or knowing how, to take up the opportunities offered. The guide is in two parts 'What Seminars are For' and 'Typical problems'.

What are seminars for?

Learning	Helping each other to learn	Developing a group response to a philosophical position
Having a go at philosophising	Running my essay idea past the group	Do I really have to speak?
Checking that we all understood the lecture/reading	Discussion,	Giving presentations
The difficulty of mixed ability in a group	Debate

 

Learning

I thought I would start with this because I was really struck by what one of the students said about seminars. She distinguished between lectures, where you learnt things, and seminars, where you didn’t. It emerged in the discussion that she was distinguishing between formal learning and informal learning. Although the informal was seen as enriching understanding, developing familiarity with, and even ownership of, ideas, and developing philosophical skills it wasn’t seen as learning.
This seems to suggest that one problem with seminars is not that we don’t know how to get the most out of them, but that we don’t know how to value what we do get out of them. It could be that we compare the activity or product of the seminar with a model of learning that doesn’t suit seminars and that, according to almost all current models of adult learning, is also not how adults learn (Dewey, 1938, Knowles, 1980. Mezirow, 1991, Jarvis, 1992).

Having a go at philosophising

As a subject philosophy is particularly well suited to seminar style learning. The model of learning where you are told stuff, you remember it, and you recall it in essays and exams just doesn’t work well when it comes to learning to philosophise. You can remember names, dates, and concepts in that way, and getting some of those in place and understood is important, but then what? The aim of philosophy is not to learn stuff by rote, but to be able to evaluate ideas and construct reasoned arguments for yourself. Looking at how famous philosophers have done that is a good way into the practice of philosophy. And the kind of questions they were addressing are in many cases the same questions the discipline is still addressing: what does it mean to be good?; how do we know what we know?; are values created by us or are we responding to qualities in the things we value? So reading texts and getting clear in your own mind the argument they are presenting is good, then you might read other philosophers presenting counter arguments and get those clear, then comes the more tricky bit (as if reading Hegel isn’t hard enough already): you need to decide who has the more convincing argument, or even, come up with a completely new one. Seminars are great as a way of engaging with all of those parts of the process, but particularly the tricky stuff at the end.

Helping each other to learn

One of the features of a seminar is that it is a forum for student interaction and what can happen is that students learn from one another. This can be in terms of transmissive knowledge - being told something by another student that you didn’t know - but a lot more than this is usually going on. You can use the seminar as a place to try out your own evaluations of the material and your own ideas, about where the problems lie. But even more important than using it to test out your ideas the process of doing that with others can result in completely new understanding, one that no-one had prior to the seminar taking place. A famous developmental psychologist described the kind of dynamic learning advance that can result in working together as our zone of proximal development. He was making the point that achievements in a group learning process are in advance of the developmental stage of an individual. Vygotsky was mainly talking about children, but his idea of the “zone of proximal development” (1978) could be extended in the adult context to describe the sense of new knowledge and deeper understanding for everyone being forged in the process of discussion in a seminar.

There is a range of ways that the public, but safe and friendly forum of the seminar can help you. Checking your understanding - rather than just thinking of this in a yes/no kind of way, in a seminar you can set out for your peers your interpretation of, e.g., what qualia are and why they matter, and use their reaction and the tutor’s to see if you are on the right lines.
Checking your progress - an important aspect of learning is reflecting on how you are getting on and the kind of reactions your contributions illicit in seminars can be a useful source of information to feed into that process of more general self-reflection, and a guide to where you need to put more attention.
Experimenting with an idea - seminars give you the chance to try out a perspective, ‘try it on for size’ and get a feel for whether you really do believe something to be the case. You can test out what others’ reactions are likely to be.
Using the language - seminars give you the opportunity to try out specialist vocabulary in a relatively safe environment; this assists in reinforcing your understanding of key concepts and ideas.
Sharing problems - discussing difficulties in a text or a concept is a really good way to begin to understand it, or if you already did understand it to deepen your understanding. Asking a question can be as productive to everyone’s learning as answering a question.
Exposure to a range of perspectives - meeting other people and talking about important ideas with them is a great ‘horizons widening’ experience. You can reinforce your knowledge of, e.g., Kant and find out what other people think of the notion of duty, how it operates in their lives, what ideas it summons up for them as well as being motivated to consider more deeply about you actually think about duty.

The difficult issue of mixed ability

Some students are concerned about seminar groups containing people of very mixed abilities with regard to philosophy. Philosophy involves subject knowledge (e.g., who said what when, what the distinction is between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime) and skills (e.g., being able to identify when someone is using an unexamined assumption or making a category error, and being sensitive to flaws in argumentation or just common sense). For this reason, as well as reticence or even withholding information because of feelings of ownership, it is actually very hard to access each other’s ability. If you could gauge philosophical ability easily what would be the use? It is often the person who hasn’t understood something or has the courage to ask a very straightforward question who can bring new problems to light or reveal other people’s assumptions.
There could be two reasons why students might want to complain about the ability of others in their group. Either they believe that they are behind and getting further behind because everyone is talking over their head (in which case ask for clarification), or they believe that they are particularly clever and are being slowed down by those with less ability. Even if we admit that some kind of gauging of ability is possible and revealed in a straightforward way in seminars this does not necessary disadvantage anybody. Most of the research on mixed abilities within a collaborative framework (e.g., working on a task as a group in a seminar) has shown that less able students benefit from explanations and help offered by more able students (Hooper and Hannafin, 1988) and that high achieving students also either benefit from mixed groups (Webb 1980) or are at least not disadvantaged by not being in a group of all high acheivers (Azmita, 1988). Given the importance of dialogue, debate and constructing clear arguments in philosophy I would imagine that the benefits of having a wide range of different qualities, abilities and life experiences amongst the participants is particularly helpful - try to relish the differences and learn from them.

Discussion

From the previous points and from your own experience it does seem to be the case that a central idea of seminars is discussion. However, useful discussion - indeed any discussion - doesn’t always happen. The students who talked about seminars in our focus groups identified this as a key feature of what distinguished a good seminar from a bad one. The following list of tips were originally constructed for tutors, but what the students identified is that all the members of a seminar are responsible for whether useful discussion takes place so they are given here for everyone.

Divide the seminar into smaller groups for some of the time. Most people are happy to talk to two or three others. (Favourite technique from both students and tutors).
Start with easy/open questions, to which anyone is able to respond intelligently.
Don’t ask, ‘how was the reading?’
Ask for applications and implications of points.
Set up scenarios using concrete examples.
Ask what consequences might follow from a particular interpretation.
Find parallel examples on the subject under discussion.
Use contention to encourage discussion - play the devil’s advocate.
Get others to express what they understand by a particular word or concept.
Use the whiteboard to sketch ideas as they develop – to model an idea and to focus attention on particular areas. This makes the idea available for others to contribute.
Be explicit about aims and purposes; say what you want to get out of the seminar.
Value what others feel is important to them.
Ask others to give examples and apply ideas in other contexts, e.g., this could be finding similarities and differences to current/historic material.
The tutor should avoid always answering questions; instead try to get students to answer them.
The students should direct questions to each other not just to the tutor.
Avoid getting into one to one exchanges; try to open the discussion out by asking for other contributions.
Get something positive out of a seemingly unpromising contribution.
The tutor should try to take a back seat to allow students to discuss amongst themselves. She or he could take on the role of recording the discussion in the form of minutes or leave the room.
Everyone be responsive to silent members and try to draw them in (sensitively).
Ask what questions others will take away with them?

Checking that we all understood the reading/lecture

Note that one of the tips for getting a discussion going is “don’t ask ‘how was the reading or lecture?’”. This usually leads to silence and shuffling feet. And yet when asked what seminars are for both tutors and students give checking understanding of the reading or lecture as one of the answers. Given that we have a system of largish lectures and small seminar groups this seems a reasonable way of thinking about their use, but it worries me that this could be read as a very transmissive model of learning. That is the idea that in the lecture information is given and in the seminar you check that the information has been received ‘correctly’. And likewise in the textbook information is given and the seminar is the place to check that you have understood it correctly. This seems a particularly unhelpful way of characterising a process that should involve critical thinking. Checking that your interpretation of and response to the lecture or reading is not hopelessly idiosyncratic is something that can take place in the seminar, but shouldn’t this emerge from your working with the others on thinking critically about those ideas? Although there are facts that can be learnt regarding philosophical positions and one could get them either right or wrong, the substance of philosophy is the type of questions and the ways of thinking about them. Remembering facts and getting them right will help, but it shouldn’t be substituted for philosophical enquiry.

Running my essay idea past the group

Given that students get marks that count towards their degree for essays and not for seminars it is not unreasonable that the students could want to use the seminar to test out their ideas. One reason they might not want to do this is a fear that other students will steal their ideas. Ownership of ideas is something drummed into students through the horror in which plagiarism is held. If on the one hand the tutor says your essay must be all your own work and then says ‘let’s use the seminar to test out our ideas and improve on them through the crucible of discussion and debate’ then we seem to have a mixed message. This mixed message is possibly rooted in the mixed message of the essay task itself. Essays are there to aid learning, we all know that being prompted to write something down throws up all kinds of problems that we hadn’t anticipated when we just thought about, e.g., Searle’s Chinese room argument. However, essays are also there as an aspect of summative assessment - they count. I want to suggest three possible ways around this:

1. separate the essay task and the seminar;
2. combine the essay task and the seminar;
3. the middle way.

1. Keeping essays and seminars separate allows us to think of the seminar as outside of any assessment process and this could free us up to seeing it as an experimental space where there is no danger in trying out wild ideas. If we take the task of seminars as a forum in which to explore philosophical ideas and practice philosophical skills perhaps this is a good way to go. We could treat the seminar as a place of safety where we can practise as opposed to the essay where we have to perform.
2. If the students are mainly concerned about essays, and writing essays is a good way of learning, then the best way to organise the seminars is to tap into those concerns and organise at least some of the seminars as essay workshops where students can bring along their plans and test them through a process of critical feedback. When there is a variety of questions for the modules this would also help towards exam revision as students would get something of the essay topics they didn’t choose.
3. There must be a number of ways to chart a middle course through these options, but I will outline one that I have tried which seemed to work. This came about because of the rules that apply when teaching for the Open University. On the philosophy course there, as on most courses, the essay question was set centrally and associate lecturers were given guidance on what to look for in an answer. The questions were extremely well formulated to prompt the student to philosophise, to really think about the question and critically examine the responses to it in the texts, but discussing the essay question in tutorials was expressly forbidden. The problem was that the students really wanted to discuss the essay question and get as many ‘clues’ as possible about the ‘right’ way to answer it. To avoid both breaking the rules and disappointing the students I adopted a sideways strategy. If the essay question asked for an exposition of Singer on animal welfare and a critical analysis of his arguments, I would spend the session on giving an exposition of Regan on animal rights and getting the students to come up with a critical analysis of his arguments. In this way we could practice and understand the distinction between exposition and analysis and I could explain about what is important in each and we could explore in detail one of the main counter arguments to Singer. In this way I could get the students to practice what they had to do in the essay, but practice it on a related thinker and one was likely come up in the exam. They were happy because they got clear something that could be useful to the essay in hand. And I hadn’t broken the rules.

Developing a group response to a philosophical position

This is an often used strategy in seminars and it performs the function of getting everyone talking about the position, e.g., idealism, in order to come to an agreed position on it. Why this is more helpful than just responding as an individual with what you think about idealism is that to come to a shared response you will need to enter into discussion and defend your interpretation and response. In doing this you might see problems that you had not anticipated on your own and you or others will need to rethink your ideas. If a shared response does not come about that does not matter, it is ok to ‘beg to differ’ as long as you have taken a long hard look at all sides. In this sense the journey (the discussion) is more important than the destination (an agreed result) it is just that without the task of attempting to reach agreement we probably wouldn’t embark on the journey.
If you very quickly reach a consensus and it seems there is no more to discuss it can be helpful for someone to question whether you do all agree or have just reached an “illusory consensus” (Christenson and Larson, 1993, Hitano and Inagaki, 1991). We are often socially primed to avoid conflict, but the emotional charge of a conflict of ideas can be a good way to learn (Natasi and Clements, 1992, Dillenbourg, 1999). Although of course we must all keep it polite and well reasoned.

Holding a debate

A very effective way of learning in seminars is to hold a debate with some students representing one view and some a contending view. Taking the view you hold as a starting point can be good especially if this means the group gets to hear lots of perspectives (Scardimalia and Bereiter, 1993), although this can get heated and you need to remember common courtesy as well as the more specialised philosophical ones like the “principle of charity” (Hursthouse, R. 2000:4-9). Alternatively you can just adopt positions for the duration of the seminar, this avoids the overheating problem, it can be more focused in terms of understanding key points in the literature. Also representing a view you do not necessarily agree with is a useful exercise to learn the skill of anticipating counter arguments, and is essential when it just so happens that your group doesn’t have any, e.g., epiphenomenalists. A good way of structuring such a seminar is half the time in small groups getting clear what your position is and anticipating counter arguments and the second half each group presenting its position and responding to the other side. The tutor could just available to both subgroups for clarification and to chair the debate.

Do I really have to speak?

From the focus groups we did at Lancaster it became clear that the thing most students hated about seminars was silences and next to that, for some, was speaking. You see the problem! On balance the students interviewed recognised that they were all responsible for keeping things going and some expressed their regret at not having actively participated as much as they could. If you think back to a recent seminar, one thing you are sure to notice is that, the bits you remember most clearly are the bits where you contributed. In the problems section there is material on no-one speaking so do have a look at that, but in answer to the question do you have to speak, the answer is pretty much yes. However, that said, the tutor has the task of making that possible and will be aware that not every student has the confidence to just dive in. If as a student you feel this is a real problem and it is hampering your education do speak to the tutor about it (yes I know, not easy, but better than in front of everyone else or get a friend to go along with you and help out). One piece of advice that is worth offering is that it starts to get easier once you do it a few times. Within a short time you might even be able to jump in with a comment without having to summon up reserves of courage and blushing down to your socks.
You will know from experience anyway, but the importance of even minimal speaking or even just nodding yes/no etc. has emerged through research into computer mediated communication (Clark and Schaefer, 1987). Being responsive in some way is really important to keep a conversation going and building a shared knowledge base, this is part of what is sometimes called “grounding” (Baker, M. et.al.) and it helps everyone in the seminar to have a sense that together we know where we are with the matter under discussion.

Giving a presentation

Seminars can be a very good forum for giving a presentation either as an individual, in pairs or small groups. Presentations can take many forms, but are usually a way of you telling the rest of the group about something.
The commonest form is probably presenting a reading, so that although you do the reading each week for the module for one week you make an extra effort over it and present it to everyone else. This would usually consist of a summary of the reading, some critical thoughts on the reading and one or two well formulated questions to prompt a discussion. Why not produce a handout to go with it and really make something of this opportunity to present ideas?
Another form of presentation is where you undertake to present a particular topic, this could be pulling together materials under a particular theme and developing your own argument. A presentation like this can be a bit more formal using powerpoint or OHP slides and a handout, but the main thing is that you are presenting what you have made of a particular subject under discussion. Remember that your presentation should be aimed at your peers, if it is to communicate to the audience, not purely to impress the tutor. The tutor will be looking for skills such as communication and accessibility, responsiveness to the group as well as philosophical ability.

Typical Problems with Seminars

Long silences

The first thing to say about silence is that it is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes silence results from lots of hard thinking going on and sometimes silence it essential to allow a shy member of the group to formulate a response they are happy with and summon up the courage to speak.
However, everyone hates those long silences which seem to last for ever and you shift from trying to think of something to say to willing the person opposite you to speak to wishing the floor would open up and swallow you. There are a number of things that can be done, some that amount to tricks of the trade, others that attempt to address the problem at a more fundamental level.

There is a reason speaking

It can’t be stressed enough that the purpose of seminars is for students to talk, everyone needs to have a go at speaking about ideas they have been studying, it brings the subject alive and helps you to connect it to the rest of your life. Knowing that it is good for you doesn’t make it any easier of course so the first strategy is to make it easy.

Pairs

People who clam up in seminars usually have no problem talking to a friend, so start off in pairs, talk to the person next to you - before the seminar starts - or the tutor can start off the seminar by asking everyone to talk to the person next to them. Even, ‘how was the lecture?’ can work in pairs. A better starting question would be, ‘in your pairs try to come up with one example from your experience of an action having unforseen consequences’, or something that relates to the issue to be discussed. The keys are to keep it open - any question with lots of possible answers and - allow personal experience a role, because everyone is an expert regarding their own personal experience.

Sub-groups

Working in smaller groups can also make talking easier and by spreading the tasks between sub-groups more material can be covered. Also because sub-group A is responsible for sub-group B’s understanding of what the problems posed by, e.g., qualia, are they will make sure they get it clear. Once you are a member of a team who have to feed back your results to the whole seminar it is much easier to chip in than when it was you on your own.

Rounds

This is where you start or punctuate the seminar with a space where everyone should say something in turn, e.g., what was the most interesting idea you encountered last week?; or, what would be your candidate for an updated list of the virtues? Make the question unthreatening and preferable not one with a yes no answer, voting is better for that. The main purpose of the round can be just to break the ice and get everyone to have at least said something then they are more likely to speak again, but it can also be used effectively to generate a useful list of things to take further in discussion.

Being explicit about the problem

It is always easier to start in the right way than to fix a dynamic in a seminar group that has become difficult. Everyone in the group is partly responsible for how it goes and one way to make a change or to start as you mean to go on is to be explicit about what you want to get out of your time in a seminar group. “The last group I was in had all these long silences it would be great to void that”, “Hardly anyone spoke last week so what about trying something new”, “Does anyone have any suggestions about how we could make these seminars more helpful, exciting, participatory, and so on”. And note that these strategies are for both tutors and students.

Not having done the reading

A very common complaint of tutors is that students have not done the reading, and a common complaint from students is that other students have not done the reading. Occasionally students might also complain that they have to do the reading. This is less common because I think it is generally understood that doing some reading is pretty central to a philosophy degree - indeed it used to be called reading philosophy.
Sometimes the problem can just be too much reading, if you are doing three subjects in the first year or four modules in years two and three each one has a heavy reading load and it can get a bit much, but you do need to do at least some of it. Tutors should be able to indicate what is absolutely essential and what is good if you have time or if you are answering a particular essay question. The reading for seminars is carefully chosen to give you the background you need or the tools you need to discuss an issue and so to get the most out of the seminar you do need to do the reading.
Also you will get a lot more out of it and it will help you more if instead of just reading you read with a question in mind. This will help you to maintain concentration and get used to reading as a means to something else. The tutor could suggest some questions as a means to focusing the reading and then everyone can attend the next seminar with something to offer.
Another possibility is to invoke “distributed expertise” (Brown et. al. 1993) and split the reading between the group then one half get more time to study e.g., Bentham, in depth and the other half can really get to grips with e.g., Mill. Then the seminar can be used for briefing each other. I have found this intensifies ones’ commitment to get it right because others are depending on you, so I get to know Bentham backwards and I can trust that the handout on Mill will be up to scratch.
The problem of some people not doing the reading is something that needs to be explicitly addressed. The tutor or other students should say what they think about it. Occasionally we all mess up but consistent failure to contribute lets every body else down as well as the individual concerned. The tutor can help a lot in making expectations explicit and giving reasons for those expectations, but they can also underline those expectations by not to filling in the gaps for people who haven’t done the work, but get on with facilitating the increased understanding of those who have made an effort.

Missing the lecture

We all occasionally miss a lecture and it should not be a huge problem, but try to catch up before the seminar by getting the relevant notes from the web and asking a student for their notes and an account of what happened. Many lectures include interactive sections that you will have missed out on, but try to find out what happened, e.g., in the dualism/monism vote. In this way you will be up to date and able to contribute to the seminar. Missing a seminar is worse because it is much harder to make up for the lost opportunity to take part in discussion and because your participation is important to the rest of the group. Seminars are compulsory, so always email your tutor to explain why you can’t come and apologise to the rest of the group the following week.

Tutor dominating the group

With reference to the sections on what is a seminar for you can see, I am sure, that what is crucially important is the input of students. This is the forum for students to try out ideas and to practice philosophising as well as to get points clarified and test them out and try to equate them with your own understanding and views on the world. What sometimes happens is that the tutor, possibly through lack of confidence, starts to guide the seminar rather too much so that it becomes a mini version of the lecture. Students can also consciously or unconsciously conspire to make this happen because, lets face it, it is much less work to hear someone speak than to formulate your own responses.
Ways around this are for the tutor to:
explicitly take a back seat, possibly even to leave the room having set a task for the group to work on;
always pass some questions over to the group, e.g., the response to, “why did Galileo make the distinction between primary and secondary qualities?” could be, “a number of reasons have been suggested, but why do you think he might, what does he gain from this manoeuvre? Anyone have any ideas on that?”
profess a lack of certainty and ask for help, e.g., “I sort of get the idea of panpsychism, everything is supposed to have some mindlike qualities, but how does that actually work? What does it mean for a rock? Can anyone help me here?”
monitor the exchanges that take place to check that everyone has opportunities to speak and that not all responses are channelled through you. You can even point out to students who answer by speaking to you to direct their answers to the group;
ask for connections to personal experience, where this can be relevant because this is valuing something that the tutor cannot provide;
hand over some of the tutor type tasks to a student, e.g., writing up things on the board, chairing a debate.

One or two students dominating the group

Having tried so hard to get everyone talking what can sometimes happen is that one or two take on the task for everyone else. Sometimes this can happen out of a mixture of desperation to avoid silence and a lack of skill in letting other people in. The tutor can do a lot to encourage wider participation: pairs, sub groups, interrupting and directing questions more widely, and having a word with individuals after the seminar to explain what is happening or being explicit about the problem in the seminar. Students can also make it clear that they want to contribute and are not getting the chance. In really difficult cases the group could even allocate air time.

General advice on domineering language within a group

The following text is adapted from work by Bill Moyer and Alan Tuttle (Off Their Backs ...and on our own two feet). Their work was about any group interactions not necessarily seminars, but a lot of the behaviours they identify can crop up in seminars.
Dominating Behaviour in Communication Within a Group:

The following strategies are very common in groups. The best way to counter this is for each individual to be attentive to their own behaviour and check that they are not using these strategies in a way that may oppress others.

? Hogging the show. Talking too much, too long and too loud.
? Problem Solving. Continually giving the answer or solution before others have had a chance to contribute.
? Speaking in Capital Letters. Giving one’s own solutions or opinions as the final word on the subject, often aggravated by tone of voice and body posture.
? Defensiveness. Responding dramatically to contrary opinions.
? Put-downs and One-upmanship. “I used to say that but I know now that ...”
? Negativism. Finding something wrong or problematical in everything.
? Focus transfer. Shifting the focus of discussion to one’s own pet issues.
? Self-listening. Formulating a response after the first few sentences, not listening to anything from that point on, and leaping in at the first pause.
? Condescension and Paternalism. Speaking down to others and expecting them to need help.
? Running the show. Continually taking charge of tasks before others have a chance to volunteer.
? Speaking for Others. “A lot of us think that we should ...” or “What she really meant was...”

If after reading that list you are feeling you are not fit to socialise with others as you yourself adopt many of these - don’t panic it is a bit like reading a medical dictionary and thinking you have at least six fatal diseases. We all do some of these some of the time and if we think about why it can be from a lack of confidence rather than too much. From my experience about 98% of students would do well to contribute more. If you still feel you could do with some self-adjustment in the ‘being less dominant arena’ read on, help is at hand. Also the following list has good tips for everyone regarding communication in the seminar group.

Solving the problem

These are positive strategies that can be used to learn more democratic ways of communicating and allowing ourselves to learn from and respect others.
? Limiting our talking time to our fair share. With ten people in a group ensure that you have a very good reason or the backing of others if you take up more than one tenth of the ‘air time’.
? Not interrupting people who are speaking. Leave a space, don’t be frightened of silence, try counting to five before speaking to ensure that a more reticent person was not prevented from getting a word in.
? Becoming a good listener. Good listening is active participation.
? Helping others to formulate and express their ideas, make the space and encourage them. (Beware of paternalism though).
? Well formulated questions are sometimes more valuable than answers.
? Not giving answers and solutions. State our opinions and beliefs but not in such a way that they are presented as more valuable than others’.
? Not speaking on every subject. We do not need to share our opinion on everything. Especially if that means we don’t get to hear someone else’s opinion on anything.
? Not putting others down. If we feel the urge to do this we should check our behaviour and examine why we want to do it. “What am I feeling?”, “What do I need?”
? Getting and giving support. Ask a friend to tell you if they observe you exhibiting behaviour that you want to stop. Swap the favour with them if they want to make changes to their behaviour.
? Students can always ask their tutor if they should contribute more or less and tutors can ask their students.

I just don’t understand this week’s topic

Yes this one is still for both audiences, sorry but it just is the case that although everyone, including the tutor, might want the tutor to be the font of all knowledge, we all have our weaker areas. Also remember that examining a problem in understanding something can lead to more than just rejecting an idea because you don’t understand it, perhaps the confusion is in the idea itself not in you.
The first thing to establish is what is it that you don’t understand, a minor wrinkle in the argument or the whole thing. Trying to pin down an answer to that question will help and you might discover that you did understand it after all.
Check your notes and those of one or more of your peers, there is no shame in asking for help it often is the beginning of a very useful discussion from which everyone benefits.
Do use dictionaries of philosophy, encyclopaedias of philosophy such as available at http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/ and introductory texts such as the Past Master series. Don’t think that learning positions or definitions by heart will replace critical thinking, but if you haven’t grasped what it is you are supposed to be thinking critically about you can’t expect to be come to any reasoned judgements about it.
If the seminar comes round and there remains a huge gap in your understanding, be honest rather than trying to bluff your way through. BUT, rather than just saying ‘I can’t make any sense of X’, see if you could do something like explain where the problem lies, e.g., ‘I don’t understand X because if it means Y then Z would follow whereas if it means B, C would follow and both Z and C don’t fit with: experience, or what she says elsewhere, or the dictionary definition of X’ and so on. Try to express what the problem is not just that you have a problem, then everyone is in a better position to help you out or they might even come round to your analysis of the situation and see that there is a problem with X that they hadn’t seen.
Never be afraid of asking a naïve question, these are often the best way of getting a discussion underway. Being brave and doing this also helps others to feel that they can have an input into the discussion.

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