What are the characteristics of a successful seminar group?
Successful groups are consistent. This is KEY. If you are not consistent, if the date moves around, you’re going to lose people. If they know that it’s, for example, the third Thursday of the month forever, then they won’t have to check when they’ve taken off time to go on vacation next year.
Next, the best groups try and read the books with goodwill. They assume the books are good, valid, and relevant. Just one person who is reading these books as a sociological or archaeological experiment can throw the group off track.
If your group has members who are there to deconstruct, to act through a culture of critique, the books turn from something that’s creative and helpful to people to something that is negative and destructive.
This kind of condescending attitude in the reader makes having a group that discusses these books with goodwill almost impossible. People will not commit to months or years of study if the group has a destructive purpose.
So the best groups believe the books have something to offer, believe that they can learn from the books, believe that they’re valid, and believe that they are relevant.
What if we want to change the format of how our group operates?
There are many valid approaches to how you choose to run your home book group. Especially as you get started, you will want to periodically check in with your group members to assess what is working and what isn’t. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with reevaluating two, three, eight, 25 meetings in and adopting another method or revising what’s become your tradition.
There are all kinds of ways to operate as a group and none of them are invalid. After you’ve done a couple of meetings, the character of your group will start to emerge and you can begin to form your own traditions. It may be that your seminar leader remains the same person for the duration of the program. Or, you can certainly use a round-robin for the seminar leader. Or take a democratic approach and host elections for seminar leaders to serve for a desired term. There are plenty of options.
What if I want to be a Seminar Leader?
At OGB@Home, we offer a huge library of discussion leader materials. In our self-study curriculum “The Socratic Crash Course”, we have a number of materials from the University of Chicago, the Great Books Foundation, and other original sources. You can find this course located in Leader Resources on the homepage.
