The idea for this paper began as a response to having observed two different professors demonstrate socratic dialogue in leading undergraduate seminars. The first professor's method reminded me very much of the 'shared inquiry' approach of The Great Books Foundation, where the emphasis is on the professor asking interpretive questions. He did ask excellent questions, yet there were many long lulls in the conversation and a high degree of student non-participation. On the other hand the second professor emphasized Socrates' role as an instigator, all of the students were engaged in and participated in the discussion, but I felt that the professor had unnecessarily dominated the flow of the discussion.

   Through both study and practice, I felt that I had developed some skill in the use of socratic dialogue that united these two strengths of approach and I wondered if I could explicate it in such a way as to be helpful to others who were trying to use such techniques in their classes. This paper is that attempt.

   Conversations that have stalled, or are going nowhere, and the failure of some students to participate, are certainly two of the most common and conspicuous problems for the maieutic seminar leader. An article in the New York Times suggests that discussion group leaders at St. John's College are willing to let their Great Books discussions lull until students come to grips with their questions. While that may work well with students who have already committed themselves to an entire curriculum that utilizes socratic approaches, my reading of his dialogues suggests that Socrates quite clearly considered it a part of his role to foment, stir, provoke, and maintain interest and commitment to the issues at hand.

   Besides the problem of a failed conversation both Robert Shoemaker and Joseph Biel, in issues of Teaching Philosophy, have discussed the problems of some students failing to participate in socratic dialogue. Shoemaker indicates that the problems of engaging students may have as much to do with the students themselves. For example, Shoemaker says, "A young person entering a first course in philosophy may or may not have already begun self-examination in such matters as religion, morality, and politics, but is rarely prepared for the bewildering array of arguments and counter-arguments, none with obvious decisiveness, which are brought against every one of his or her beliefs."

   Biel picks up the discussion of such possible student resistance to participation recognizing that socratic dialogue "can lead to frustration when a well-intentioned teacher encounters students who choose not to participate." Biel argues that often, unlike the circumstances a college philosophy professor is faced with, Socrates benefited from a personal relationship with his companions and the democratic setting of Athens in which to use his methods. (While this article will go on to emphasize methods and techniques, creating a personal relationship and making a classroom seminar more democratic are certainly the greater issues in making a maieutic seminar authentic and successful.)

   However, whereas I otherwise commend both the Shoemaker and Biel's articles, I think that neither of them have duly considered the techniques and methods for overcoming student resistance and improving socratic techniques. In this regard, Biel says,

Plato, with the figure of Socrates, has provided teachers of philosophy with a vivid model of how to proceed with students who are disposed to engage in dialogue and who are willing to struggle with the resistance that lies within. But he offers little explicit guidance for dealing with those who, for various reasons, prefer to remain silent.

   While Biel is certainly correct in saying that Socrates offer little "explicit" guidance, he has left the implicit guidance of his example.

   A Caveat: While the remainder of this article will emphasize techniques that I have identified and have found helpful in leading seminars and implementing socratic dialogue, I would like to re-emphasize the fundamental points that Biel has made about developing personal relationships with students and creating a more democratic environment with the seminar. The techniques I will discuss are based on those value premises. Also, I recognize that there is some truth to the implicit criticism of my emphasis on method and technique, that the telos of the method is to keep discussion going, though to what end? Of course method and content must be interrelated. Socratic dialogue is premised on the assumption that Truth exists and that it can be discovered through the dialectic. The ultimate end of the dialogue, the conversation, the maieutic seminar is knowledge. Insight certainly sets the major standard by which a given discussion can be judged. My article only adds that by example Socrates has also demonstrated a value of a conversation well led.

   In a somewhat Aristotelian process, then, I have studied and catalogued techniques that I have "discovered" in the Socratic dialogues, and that have worked, in an updated form, for me. I have identified five particular strategies that Socrates used. They are that Socrates:

1. Asked probing questions about the ideas and issues being discussed.
2. Asked expansive questions about the relationships among ideas.
3. Utilized the 'Devil's Advocate' role and other comic relief.
4. Spent time on group maintenance and the group process.
5. Took advantage of positions and roles taken on by others in the discussion.

I. Asking probing questions about the ideas and issues being discussed.

But speaking of this very thing, justice, are we to affirm thus without qualification that it is truth telling and paying back what one has received from anyone, or may these very actions sometimes be just and sometimes unjust?
    Republic 331c1-4

   I have found the work Mortimer Adler has done with "ideas" in The Syntopticon extremely helpful. Adler identifies over 100 ideas (e.g. justice, happiness, fate, beauty) that he has found to have preoccupied Western writers. I have found that the issues suggested by about twelve of these ideas come up over and over again as my classes work with the meanings of text. Each of these issues can be raised to better understand the work being studied, and what general contribution that work might make to the Great Conversation. My favorites include:

• Knowledge. What constitutes valid knowledge? And, how do we know what we know (epistemology)? Is Truth absolute or relative? Whether the Forms for Plato, or the heart for Faulkner, most works have assumptions if not declarations about this idea.
• Heroes. (Actually Adler includes the issues of the "image of man" and "human nature" in his discussion of "Man.") The standards of Antigone, Aeneas, David, the Apostle Peter offer very different understandings of what is best meant by being human. Most works offer some variation of this theme
• Justice. I often ask students to place a work's view of justice somewhere in the polarity between Plato's view of justice as "differentiation" and Mill's emphasis on egalitarianism.
• What is the meaning of life? (Adler offers such ideas as happiness and love.) Why does Aeneas leave Dido? Why does Medea kill her children? Why does Ike (of The Bear) renounce his inheritance? I have found that such variations of the "meaning of life" question are among the best at encouraging students to interpret text.
• Good and Evil. Is good a "lack of true knowledge"? a separate entity? what?
• Human nature? What makes one human? What is the relation of emotion and intellect? Are humans basically good, bad, or neither?
• God. Is God understood as a form, a cause, a Person, an idea, Nature, or Fate?
• Government. Is the work "conservative" or "liberal"? Does it assume a preference for a strong central authoritarian scheme of governance, or a more democratic one? Is it like Plato where a "town is greater than a man" or like Emerson where "after all, isn't a man greater than a town?" And what is the relationship of the author's view of government with the view of human nature?
• Freedom. What is the relationship of freedom and responsibility? What is the view of liberty vs. license? Is the view of freedom one of a freedom of thought? What about the freedom to walk safely in one's environment?
• Beauty. Is beauty truth and truth beauty as Keats suggests?
• Being/becoming. Is the emphasis on "being" who one was born to be, or becoming something that is preferred and yet attainable?
• Essence/existence. What are the assumptions about this issue? Does the author share Plato's conviction that essence precedes existence, or Sartre's that existence precedes essence?

But I don't mind telling you the truth about Love if you're interested; only, if I do, I must tell it in my own way....
    Symposium 199a6-b2

   Superior works in philosophy tend to be better known for the benefit of multiple readings rather than the ease with which one can easily comprehend their meanings. Interpretive questions like those above do not work if the text is not understood. What to do then? I am certainly not above some "telling." I don't exactly agree with Plato that it'd be better to kill someone than to miseducate them, but eventually I am unwilling to stay with a discussion that is simply wrong headed. Some of the devices I have found that tend to keep the discussion in the interrogative mode and yet spur students to better comprehension include:

1. Asking students to find and read passages that they have had trouble with.
2. Asking students to find and read passages students have neglected but that the discussant recognizes will help students sort out an issue.
3. Asking students to read a passage aloud (while interrupting periodically for a summary of what has been read. )
4. Asking students to clarify a key term (usually with a few page references to study that term in context.)
5. Asking students to walk through the basic organization or logic of the text on a step by step basis. (If one is not careful this very easily can become the teacher asking the student to "guess what's in my mind" instead of a true walk through the material.)
6. Asking students who have come to an early grasp of the material to summarize key points or understandings.
7. Asking students to explain two passages that might seem in contradiction to one another.
8. Asking students to try to find a key sentence or paragraph that suggests the meaning of the whole work.
9. Asking students for their best question about the text.
10. Asking students for their best remaining question about the text (towards the end of an otherwise worthy discussion about a key issue in a text).

II. Expansive Questions about the relationship of ideas

Well. surely we can see now that the soul works in just the opposite way. It directs all the elements of which it is said to consist. opposing them in almost everything all through life. and exercising every form of control and conversing with the desires and passions and fears as though it were quite separate and distinct from them. It is just like Homer's description in the Odyssey where he says that Odysseus,
    Then beat his breast' and thus reproved his heart,
    Endure. my heart. still worse hast thou endured. Odyssey 20.17

Do you suppose that when he wrote that he thought that the soul was an attunement, liable to be swayed by physical feelings?
    Phaedo 94c9-e2

   My greatest joy as a discussant is in considering competing ideas about the great issues. Although I warn my students against doing this in formal writing, I love to think about such questions as what might have Antigone, or Medea, or Virgil, or Augustine, or Rousseau, or Sartre, have thought of this aspect of the text at hand? Thus some of the considerations I have in asking students to relate ideas across and among texts include these considerations:

• Compare and contrast this text with that text. How is it the same? different?
• If the idea has a fairly obvious antecedent, I will ask, "where have you seen this before?"
• Profile this text in terms of all the other texts previously read. With which other work does it share the closest world view?
• I liken the relationship of the great ideas to a spider web. An author's assumptions about God, human nature, good and evil, and the rest all have implications for the other. Once a student or a class has fixed on a clear idea about one topic, for example government, I like to skip over to a related issue, like human nature, and explore what the relationship might be. (For example, the more negative an author tends to view human nature, the more likely the person will have a statement for strong, centralized decision making and government.)
• Similar to the point immediately above this one, I like to play a game I call "connect the dots, la, la, la, la" (an allusion to a favorite kids show on TV). The difference between this point and the one above is that on the spider web I might spend more time with one idea. With connect the dots I will spend a short amount of time pursuing numerous interrelated connections. If the author says this about God, what does she say about human nature? Is it the same or the opposite of Aristotle? Then what about Sartre? Then what does the author have to say about government? This game only works when students have basically come to grips with an entire text. The rather rapid fire rate of questions presumes that students already have the answers, they just need to solidify the connections. It is not the dialectic per se, but it does stay in the interrogative and, used sparingly, can be very helpful.
• Almost every class period someone will say something is "good" or "bad." This is always an invitation to ask the student how they define that term, and whether they have a Platonic, Christian, utilitarian, or other definition in mind. It is a constant prompt for the mini-review of Great Books.
• The Polyfocal Conspectus . Perhaps it lacks proportion to share the metaphor that most influences my thinking about Great Books and academia here in the last point of a subsection on leading great books discussions. So it gose (with self conscious homage to Vonnegut intended). In a "School Review" article many years ago Joseph Schwabb defined the "polyfocal conspectus." He said that a polyfocal conspectus is a "view affording doctrine on reality." An author or an author's specific idea becomes a view affording doctrine on reality when it is successfully used as an intellectual tool to the better understanding of some situation encountered in reality. For example, Hegel can be very helpful to the understanding of both Marx and Darwin. Rousseau can be very helpful to an understanding of Faulkner's The Bear. Perhaps Marx offers a different way of understanding Ibsen's Hedda. At its best this polyfocal conspectus means that the application helps one understand BOTH the "original" idea AND the application more fully.

III. The Devil's Advocate and Other Comic Relief

Socrates: I am that gadfly which God has given the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you. arousing and persuading and reproaching you.
    Apology 30e3-31a1

   Theodore Roethke reportedly crawled through the snow on the ledge of the third story window of his Literature classroom and announced that "the cardinal sin of an educator is to be boring." Sometimes a class discussion takes on a special magic that makes one feel with Emerson that one is happy and strong in the present above time. But these special times are hard earned and the exception. (I encourage myself with the Aristotelian idea that the good is better when it is hard...) I have read that at St. Johns the discussant will let the conversation lag until it finds its own way. Personally, I will admit to having decided that I only have a certain patience, that life is short, and with Dickens that the people must amuse themselves. I am far more scrupulous than is, perhaps, commonly realized about keeping the humor concept related (which is the only kind of humor that has been shown to correlate with academic achievement). I do consistently amuse myself (and sometimes the class, although such is not required) in the following manners (or lack thereof).

Polus: What Socrates? Is what you are saying your true opinion about rhetoric?
    Gorgias 461b3

• I will be the Leviathan himself if it is necessary to add a neglected point of view to the discussion.
• I will make an outlandish generalization like "this work is more important than The Communist Manifesto."
• I will deliberately (but obviously) falsely stereotype a student's position and challenge students to tell me differently.

Meno: Socrates. even before I met you and they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity.
    Meno 80a

• Malaprops. I try to find them in text, but I will also use my own. My favorite is telling a student who can turn to the exact page they have in mind that s/he must have a "photogenic" memory.
• Puns. The lowest form of humor?
• If I have established a minimal amount of trust with a shy student, I love to ask them to read odd passages in our texts (like Plato saying small people cannot be handsome) and then asking them to remind me why this particular book is so well regarded?
• When the classics are seeming too remote, I like to ask students if they would either date or hug this author/character?
• Brow beating (with good humor). Sometimes, if I have established a particularly trustworthy relationship with a class I will focus on a particular student (who can take it) and question her/him continuously in my best "inquisitor" style.
• I will accuse someone of having done something very much like what we found in the text (as long as I know they could not have done such-I learned my lesson as a high school teacher when I hypothesized a student had robbed a store, and he had).
• Since Great Books tend to emphasize rationality I love to ask "how do you feels" about some issue we are discussing, and then to challenge the validity of even answering such a question about "feeling" in a course presumably devoted to rationality.
• I love to ask students whether an answer is either A) or B) when the "true" answer is neither (because I think it important to teach students they need not accept the parameters of a question).

We ourselves grow old and make slips, you younger people present may set us right both in actions and in words.
    Gorgias 461c6

• If the class needs a concrete example of text, I'll try to imagine one.
• I might ask, what if it was your roommate instead of .Medea, Antigone, Hedda?
• We have a sign in class that says "no eating or drinking." Inevitably someone violates the rule. It very easily segues into a discussion about what the particular author we are reading might have to say about human nature, laws, civil disobedience.
• I can only make it work about once a month, but I love to focus in on one student and ask the question Why? and then to each subsequent answer another Why? in a very Aristotelian, back to the original cause kind of way. I try to use my best prosecuting attorney demeanor.
• I will pick on a student's clothes (clothes do give hints on whether the student is prizing a back to nature orientation or a fully industrialized preference, whether the T-shirts are advertising something more natural or not; do suggest an underlying code related to great ideas).

Callicles: For philosophy. you know...is a pretty thing if you engage in it moderately in your youth; but if you continue in it longer than you should, it is the ruin of any man.
    Gorgias 484c3-8

I love to utilize a foil. If nothing else is working(and my point is that without engagement there will be no likely progress), I attack the foil, accusing them of either great heroics or low down meanness. The foil must always be one of the best students, respected and liked by all the other students, the proud owner of a great sense of humor someone I'd probably adopt. Because students have seen real attacks by teachers in classrooms, the adrenaline picks up regardless how safe students really are in your classroom. The attack also changes the general frame of mind in the class and picks the energy level back up. This must be done with conspicuous good humor.

Ion: And I judge that I, of all men, have the finest things to say on Homer...
    Ion 530c7-d3

I have come to conflicting conclusions about the role of listening in seminars. First, I need to be a better listener. But second, the flow of the conversation is more important than any one contribution. The energy must be sustained with quick cuts to points that are indeed in conflict with one another. When someone is reading a passage, for example from The Prince, or The Leviathan', I do not hesitate to interrupt with questions likes "would you want to live in that kind of place?" "Wouldn't you be happier in Singapore where it is safe to walk the streets?" Beyond the surprising rudeness, such behavior tends to force students to try to grasp the implications of a text. In a related manner, I don't know how long the group memory will last of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I love to announce to the class during readings about strong leaders that "I am the Pumpkin King!" and that I "have the finest things to say on Homer." Additionally, I will seed discussion with personal, class, TV, movie, newspaper examples of similar issues to those in the text of the day. The ability to apply the author's view of justice to a current situation helps the student move up Bloom's Taxonomy to "application" and helps keep the text timely and fresh. And I will often follow up that discussion with more discussion about the relationship of the particular and universal.

A contradiction arose in the argument--which is just what you love and you yourself steer the argument in that direction...
    Gormas 461b3-c3

I will try to provoke a debate between two students. I am unapologetic when two students are shouting over their judgments about Ophelia. I remain unconvinced that rational discourse is at the exclusion of passion.

All of us as we afterwards remarked to one another. had an unpleasant feeling at hearing them say this. When we had been so firmly convinced before. now to have our faith shaken seemed to introduce a confusion and uncertainty...
    Phaedo 88c1-5

There's a time for arduous, rigorous, hard headed analysis, but animation is also required. It's also true that the risks 1 take are more possible at Pepperdine where we espouse the belief that the student is the "heart of the educational enterprise." Fiedler indicates our beliefs are no stronger than the extent to which they have been challenged. I certainly try to challenge, but hopefully never in a way that values the text more than the student. I believe that if I can be there for the student, the extremes to which I will go to to foment learning will reflect that priority.

IV. Time spent on the group maintenance and the group process

We should recognize that we ourselves are still intellectual invalids, but that we must embrace ourselves and do our best to become healthy...
    Phaedo 90d9-91al.

• How do we decide? This is implicit to any text about government. It also applies to aspects of the course. The final schedule and book list are ordinarily pre-determined. But how many exams? When? How should we decide? How have the texts helped define this issue? (I usually seek consensus that we will make such decisions on the basis of a 2/3 majority. Then, if we have trouble deciding on dates or numbers of exams, I will invariably mention the inefficiencies of democratic forms of government, and how do they "feel" about those inefficiencies.)
• Students will tend to speak in the direction of the discussant. I have already confessed that I prefer to influence the tempo of the discussion, so I tend to be the lion tamer, referee, provocateur, focal point for the discussion. As I can, when two student positions are clearly in conflict, I will say, "tell that person." If a conversation is "stuck," I will sometimes move to a different seat in the classroom and it will change the dynamics of the discussion.
• Eventually your questions will have to include everyone. Frankly some of your questions will be too elementary for your quickest students. So, sometimes you have to forestall that student and try to pry the answer out of a more reluctant student.
• College students tend to rarely sleep. I have at times even stooped to having students do short physical exercises to get the blood flowing. And I will ask, "are you awake?" "are you with us?" I like to think I can stimulate any group, but 8 a.m. classes during midterms and finals tell me it is not entirely my fault when one or two students look sleepy.
• If someone says something I might otherwise object to, I will often ask the epistemological question of how they think they know what they know?
• Poll taking can be quite valuable. It includes each and every student on a course related issue. Questions: do you agree? is this how you understand it? can you add to this? Also, while the emphasis of shared inquiry is on interpretation, once students do grasp a work, it is worthwhile to survey their evaluation of the significance of the ideas or work.
• Related to poll taking, discussions do not ordinarily result in "a" conclusion. The issue is whether the students have argued the issue to their satisfaction.
• I will ask students who have not committed to a particular discussion who it is they think has had the "best" idea and why.
• I have found that it is all too rare that students will perform the "gatekeeping" role for a group. The discussant must protect any "struggling" member of the group. The discussant must also try to identify the value of the many different kinds of contributions to a discussion. Participants are often only caught up in their own particular contributions, but the group need to see the benefits of the whole.
• A student once announced to her class that "they were responsible for her education." Such declarations are to be remembered and retold by the discussant.
• Personal comments of encouragement and recognition of individual students outside the class can be very helpful to the group process.

If you feel any difficulty about our discussion. don't hesitate to put forward your own views. and point out anyway you think my account could be improved....Very well Socrates. said Simmias. I will be quite open with you. We have both been feeling difficulties for some time, and each of us has been urging the other to ask questions....
    Phaedo 84c1-d6

• The summarizer. This student is invaluable, if somewhat frustrating. As discussant I am often using all my energy to keep the flow of the conversation going while these students tend to sit in their seats looking sagacious. But at the end of the conversation when they are able to sum up what has gone on, it is so much more helpful to the group than any summation the professor would have tried to do.
• The foil. (See above under comic relief. I would only add here that by establishing the right to "attack" this very durable student, you open up the possibility of gently prodding the more reluctant student without resentment.)
• The textual expert. How my heart warms to have students who will consistently ask others to go back and look specifically at the text. If you are trying to keep the momentum of the conversation going, it is not always possible to pinpoint that exact passage you were looking for.
• The risk taker. This role is as important as that of the foil for me. Many students will tend to hold back until they are absolutely sure of what they think about something. Great students, but as the discussant, you cannot let the conversation always wait that long.

"The detached studies...will now be brought together in a comprehensive view of their connexions with one another and with reality." Plato, The Republic, Chapter XXVIII, Section VII. What kind of learning is going on?

   While this paper has focused on the techniques of leading the maieutic seminar, if the focus of the seminar is not on understanding and critically assessing the arguments of the primary texts, the discussion would be mere sophistry at best. Thus I will conclude with an example of one of my favorite strategies that suggests how I use these techniques to go beyond the analysis of respective texts towards the teaching of philosophy.

   With a little luck the day we are going to discuss John Locke's On Civil Government a student will either be tardy, or will want to explain why s/he missed the previous class. Assuming I have established rapport with the student and the class I will query, somewhat stentorianly, "Liberty or license?" (see section I, Probing Questions). It's the distinction Locke makes at the very beginning of that work. I make my question sound challenging. Invariably students pay attention to see what will happen to the apparently offending student. In truth I do want to pursue the question to see whether their "reason" seems more likely a matter of liberty or license. I am sometimes surprised by how often a student's reasons for being late or having missed a class do seem like exercises of liberty. In any instance this ploy usually does hook the students' interest. And it does help to get them into the text. It causes the students to define what Locke means by liberty and license. That discussion consistently leads to textual questions about his assumptions about Freedom, Justice, and the State (see Section II, Expansive Questions). This consistently yields larger questions about the text and answers supported by text.

Analyzing basic assumptions and evaluating the validity and soundness of arguments.

   But the discussion must not end there. Fortunately, the implicit fact that I might possible impose a consequence for missed class time, and that I may or may not be persuaded by Locke's argument, tends to cause students to critique Locke's philosophy from outside the text. Do the students think Locke should apply to my own decision making as the professor of the class? Are Locke's assumptions ill founded? Is or isn't Locke too sanguine in his understanding of human nature? Wouldn't tyrannical behavior on the part of the professor lead to better and more timely attendance? I often posture here arguing that having read Machiavelli and Hobbes I understand how students truly are and that I am of a mind that swift retribution is called for (see Section III, The Devil Advocate's Role). Invariably a few students will nod their heads that such behavior on the professor's part would keep more students in line, but usually someone else will finally note that our course is an optional way of meeting requirements and that while such an approach might work in the short run, in the long run the students would just choose to take some other series of courses (see Sections IV and V, Group Maintenance and Student Positions). Because this issue pertains to the student in question and because attendance is related to group maintenance, this conversation has the benefit of implicitly working towards the individual's and the group's benefit. It is also fairly easy to lead the discussion towards a critique of Locke's assumptions about human nature, freedom, governance.

   The discussion of assumptions, then, is also very conducive to getting to the issues of an author's logic, especially deductive logic, and the issues of both valid and sound arguments. For example, Locke argues that man is born with "a title to perfect freedom." Students fairly readily come to see that he then has a "valid" argument that man then has rights to "life, liberty, and estate." But is this also a "sound" argument? What conclusion would be reached if the premise is that man is not born with rights to perfect freedom? Often certain students find themselves more or less in agreement with the arguments of Machiavelli and Hobbes, yet hoping that this particular professor will agree with Locke. And what is the significance of this apparent contradiction between what they think and want? All of this opens up rich possibilities for not only understanding Locke more fully, but in learning to do their own philosophical work in such areas as evaluating assumptions and critiquing lines of argument.

   Even though I have initiated such discussion untold times, I never know exactly how the inquiry will go, and that keeps it fresh. But if I have managed to pick on a "fun" student, the conversation has extra energy, and I can use that energy to first analyze Locke, and then to criticize Locke, especially his assumptions and the validity of his argument. I cannot promise this particular line of discussion on liberty and license will work for the reader, but then my point is only that when I am doing my best work with the maieutic seminar I find that I am only following precedent. Socrates baited his audience, had them analyze the issues and stories before them, and then critiqued all of that according to basic assumptions and quality of argument.

Conclusion

   Will these suggestions make a maieutic seminar work? Not necessarily. Are there precedents for them in the teaching strategies of Socrates? Yes. Have they worked for me? Yes. Based on personal relationships with students and on a more democratic approach to seminar teaching, Yes, they have worked. What does it mean that these methods have "worked"? It means that they have been immensely helpful in keeping virtually all students involved in discussion, and without such involvement there will surely be no learning. I also believe that these techniques lead very naturally to teaching students to think critically, to analyze assumptions and to evaluate arguments. It is a very "old fashion" idea, but I think that our own enhanced involvement in the dialectical process has led all participants to better approximations of truth.

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