ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a strategy, the Paideia Seminar, whereby students deliberately practice thinking skills while discussing a text through a structured process in a controlled setting. The Paideia Seminar nurtures basic speaking and listening as well as reading and writing skills, the literacy skills that make up thinking. The chapter also discusses on thinking, mental equilibrium and disequilibrium, negative capability, cognitive dissonance, maieutic and Socratic questions, understanding, and fluency. The goal of teaching thinking through dialogue is student thinking that is more clear, coherent, and sophisticated. It is intellectual in that the purpose of the seminar is to come to grips with the ideas and values in the text, the concepts that lie at the heart of the curriculum. The role of the seminar facilitator is to provoke discussion through a series of open-ended questions, which take the students deeper into the textual ambiguities where the ideas and values live.
