SMALL GROUP PROCEDURES

Your seminars in PALOD are opportunities to put into practice the theory we are studying and your commitment to the Covenant. The PALOD seminar ought as a consequence to be very different from most other seminars or group meetings you have experienced. At the end of the quarter, the members of each seminar group will evaluate each other's contributions to making the seminar an effective environment for mutual learning. Towards that end, please follow the following procedures.

1. Responsible Preparation. Make sure that every member of your group has a copy of your response-paper before Tuesday. Failure to do so deprives every one of a major learning opportunity deprives you of thoughtful feedback and wastes the too-little time of the seminar in reading your paper in seminar-time. As the Covenant says, your response paper, completed and distributed on time, is your ticket of admission to the seminar.

2. Appoint a timekeeper to run the meeting. This person should be different every time. The timekeeper should divide the time of the seminar to assure an equal amount of attention to each paper. The timekeeper should also attempt to give each person equal opportunity to respond to each paper. One or two persons speaking for most of the time and three-to-four others saying nothing is not a good seminar.

3. Appoint a Small-Group Reporter. This person should be different every time. Learning the skills of reporting on a meeting is a highly valuable skill. It is also a concentrated test of your ability to implement the perspectives of this program. And a vital contribution to sustaining conversations in the whole group. The reporter should:

a. Listen exquisitely.

b. Before the following Tuesday, post to the website a report that helps the entire program feel they have some sense of the most important things hat they missed. Minimally, this report should include (1) the two-to-three major foci of discussion, (2) the range of diverse opinions expressed (with names attached), (3) lingering questions that the group's members will likely wish to follow up on somehow.

4. Record in your Portfolio your responses to the seminar, most particularly what you have learned and how you have modified the response you wrote on your own.