ABSTRACT
The real challenge is to define thinking in a way that helps one understand how someone learns to think more skillfully and how to teach those skills. Learning to think, then, is the process of successfully explaining and manipulating increasingly complex texts. The teacher and students collaboratively challenge and sharpen each other's thinking all along the way. In order to generate the kind of discussion that both inspires and teaches thinking, a text must be rich in ideas and values, complex in the relationships between those ideas and values, and ambiguous enough to defy easy explanation. Explaining and manipulating a text often involves the intellectual skills that are commonly referenced in education circles. The literacy cycle of the Seminar includes five steps: pre-seminar reading, preparation for speaking and listening, the dialogue per se, a reflection on speaking and listening, and a post-seminar writing assignment.
