We did the group seminar of quotes sharing on Wednesday last week, this is a completely new way of seminar-ing came up by Dr.Terret. We need to choose four leaders, with each leader managing a group. I volunteered to be a leader, because I found it interesting, and felt happy to try it as my first experience of being a leader(in eighth grade). 

As a leader, I found it really hard to count points, share my own views, and manage who should say first at the same time. (Though it may be because I didn’t prepare enough, and I’m not really familiar with the low middle and high thingy.) These difficulties could lead to severe mistakes. So maybe next time, we should separate the work(have a co-leader or sth) and get slightly more time to prepare. 

I feel like when we are in groups, people talk more. I know that’s great for the introverted ones, but contrarily the extroverted ones are more likely to talk about personal stuff or unrelated topics. I’m not sure if we really need to make changes to this, because even though some of the points may seem unrelated or a waste of time, some of the points provided interesting insights. 

I think it is also debatable about having shared discussions in different groups. In this seminar, it seems like all groups had discussed “Every road leads to Rome”, and shared similar views about this. It is really nice discussing “Every road leads to Rome” with people who had never discussed it before, and we could get higher scores through this(💦. But when everyone had discussed it, the topic would be boring. 

Conclusion:

On the good side, people got more chances to speak(therefore most of us got 8), and the introverted ones won’t feel too pressured to speak. Group discussion might spark interesting insights that students may not dare to say when facing the whole class. But this kind of seminar also faced some downfalls. Such as hard doing a leader’s job, and the possibilities of discussing useless/boring topics.

Personally, I really like the part of this kind of seminar with everyone getting an 8, but except that, I favour our old form of seminar.

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