How often in hearing a lecture or participating in a discussion is your thinking really challenged or significantly developed?  Not often enough if you are like many in academia, yet we continue to attend lectures.  Why do we do this? Applebaum (1972) in her provocative paper, "On hearing, presenting and discussing scientific papers,"suggests the reasons range from the superficial to the unconscious and from the infantile to the mature.  A careful reading of her article may offer you a rich reward in that you have many lectures and discussions ahead of you.  Her paper helps to clarify the purpose of different formats, thus increasing the likelihood of benefit.  A major responsibility for this class will be for you to lead and participate in discussion. I have written the following guidelines to facilitate your assignment.

The primary goal in our discussions is to learn from one another.  In order to do this best we need to create an atmosphere that promotes free discussion and facilitates "two way talk".  We are interested in discussions that will promote an enlarged understanding of ideas and values rather than discussions that simply increase our knowledge or develop our skills.  For a discussion to work well, a group needs to develop something akin to a therapeutic alliance.  We need to develop a "discussion alliance" or a discipline of discussion.  I will summarize some points that I hope will enhance our discussions further.  I will be quoting and adapting freely from Dr. Mortimer J. Adler's book, How To Speak And Listen.  Dr. Adler is well suited to write about how best to conduct intellectual discussions.  He has led seminars at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies for the past thirty years.  He is Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, editor of Great Books of the Western World and author of numerous books, the most successful of which is How To Read A Book, written over fifty years ago and selling over 8 million copies.  If you haven't read it I suggest you do so before finishing graduate school. Perhaps because I am still learning to read, I will include another work on reading by Harold Bloom, the leading literary critic of our time and a Shakespeare scholar. In his How to Read and Why he inspires one to read deeply and read well, arguing that "ultimately we read to strengthen the self, and learn its authentic interests."

Discussion Leader or Moderator

For our meetings to be successful, they are best considered as a discussion among equals with the leaders or moderators superior only in the sense that they have done more reading and thinking on the issues at hand by virtue of their advanced preparation.  Socrates provides a good example in which he saw himself simply as the principal inquirer, "the first among equals".  With this in mind, I am asking our leaders to do the following:

First of all I am asking our discussion leaders to carefully select and examine one article on your chosen topic and raise a series of questions that will be used to give direction to our discussion.  Along with the questions the leader should also distribute a critical annotated bibliography of 3-5 articles on the chosen topic. In developing your annotations, place them in a critical dialogue with the chosen article. Sometimes just one question will be enough; sometimes three or four will be needed.  It will be best to use questions that raise issues.  The best questions are ones that occur to you after a thorough study of the article.  These questions are ones you frequently can not adequately answer.  They should be questions that will raise further questions when first answers are given.  It is likely that the questions raised by the moderator will lead the discussants to raise further and perhaps more focused questions of their own.  They will be questions that can seldom be answered yes or no, and may be hypothetical questions that present suppositions, the implications of which will be examined.  It may be useful for the moderator or discussants to use clinical vignettes to illustrate or clarify their responses to the questions at hand.

Secondly, I am asking our discussion leaders to examine the answers given to the questions by trying to evoke the reasons for the answers and the implications they have.  If the question being answered is not understood, the discussion leader may need to repeat the question in a number of different ways using a variety of concrete examples to get the question clear.

Thirdly, I am asking our moderators to engage the participants in "two way talk" with one another when the views they have advanced appear to be in conflict.  To perform the second and third tasks, the moderator must be as active in listening as in questioning.  Adler says that from his long experience, this is the moderators most important obligation and the one most difficult to discharge well. The energy required to listen to each participant is very tiring.  Adler says it is possible to give two or three good lectures (one way talk, teaching by telling) in one day, but he doubts if anyone has the energy to conduct more than one good seminar in a day.

The purpose of our discussions will not be to reach conclusions about which we all agree.  Rather, it should leave us with an understanding of the questions to be answered and the problems to be solved.  In the succession of discussions that we have planned, whatever understanding has been achieved in the earlier meetings should be used in dealing with questions or issues raised in later meetings. If this is what we hope for from our discussion leaders, what is necessary on the part of our discussion participants.

Discussion Participants

The state of mind we bring to the meeting is of primary importance.  First of all the participants need to come prepared to discuss.  To do this well the article that is chosen by the discussion leader should be read TWO TIMES and you should raise some questions of your own as well as think about the questions that the leader has raised.  All participants, including the moderator, should come with open minds and be prepared to change their mind as a result of the discussion.  We should be open to views that are new, neither stubbornly resistant nor passively submissive.  Adler points out the fact that although many educated people have had courses in reading, writing and speaking that few, if any, have ever had courses in listening.  To listen and understand what our colleagues are saying will perhaps be our most difficult task.  You might say that this shouldn't be that difficult for a group of therapists who have been trained to listen, but the type of listening most of us have been trained to do differs markedly from the type that makes for good discussion.  In fact, listening for unconscious meanings may at times interfere with what can make for good discussion.

The first rule to be followed is: do not agree or disagree until you are sure you understand the position the other person is taking.  "To disagree before you understand is impertinent.  To agree is inane".  To insure we understand one another before agreeing or disagreeing is often time consuming and requires patience and persistence, but it is necessary if we seek to have a genuine meeting of minds.

Adler suggests that if you find yourself in genuine disagreement that you should be able to explain the grounds of your disagreement by saying one of the following things.  I will quote Adler directly:

1. "I think you hold that position because you are uninformed about certain facts or reasons that have a critical bearing on it".  Then be prepared to point out the information you think the other lacks and which, if possessed, would result in a change of mind.
   
    
2. "I think you hold that position because you are misinformed about matters that are critically relevant".  Then be prepared to indicate the mistakes the other has made, which, if corrected, would lead the other to abandon the position taken.
   
    
3. "I think you are sufficiently well informed and have a firm grasp of the evidence and reasons that support your position, but you have drawn the wrong conclusions from your premises because you have made mistakes in reasoning.  You have made fallacious inferences".  Then be ready to point out those logical errors, which if corrected, would bring the other person to a different conclusion.
   
    
4. "I think you have made none of the foregoing errors and that you have proceeded by sound reasoning from adequate grounds for the conclusion you have reached, but I also think that your thinking about the subject is incomplete.  You should have gone further than you did and reached other conclusions that somewhat alter or qualify the one you did reach".  Then be able to point out what these other conclusions are and how they alter or qualify the position taken by the person with whom you disagree.

Let me finish by further quoting what Adler says seminar teaching by questioning and discussion is not:

It is not a quiz session in which a teacher asks Yes or No questions and says right or wrong to the answers.

It is not a lecture in disguise in which the teacher asks questions and, after a brief pause or after listening to one or two unsatisfactory responses, then proceeds to answer his own questions at length, thus in effect giving a lecture that is punctuated by the questions asked.

It is not a glorified "bull session" in which everyone feels equally free to express opinions on the level of personal prejudices or to recount experiences that the narrator of them regards as highly significant of something or other.

None of the foregoing counterfeits of the seminar provides the kind of learning that a seminar should afford when it is properly conducted by questions and answers and by the discussions of their significance.

The primary focus of the discussion you are to lead and participate in will follow the seminar approach just described.  However, since this is a group psychotherapy course I have included an article by Bader (1993) that provides an example of how to include an experiential component.  His article on running a workshop will be useful in preparing for this assignment. Kennard (1993), is included as a reference here as an example of how to design the group role-play that you are responsible to design and lead prior to your discussion.

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