Dear Katherine,

Thank you so much for sharing these resources with me. One very important goal in our situation is to help faculty and researchers interested in our topic to get to know each other and to get the broad picture on our topic. I believe that the official participant abstracts and titles will attract faculty who we want to draw into our ranks, so keeping the talks short and informal will better facilitate that. The resources are very helpful and I am going through them with our dean, who is more familiar with the conference. I do think that some visuals and AV might be helpful though, so I am thinking to create one ppt for the whole session, and then pass the remote.

Best regards,

Paul Sevigny

There are more formats than just panel and round table: have a look at these for starters:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/~/media/Educators/Educators_downloads/discussion_formats.ashx

http://drscavanaugh.org/discussion/inclass/discussion_formats.htm

Dear Claus,

Thanks for those great resources. Conference workshop formats can definitely be overly limiting. I think I am realizing that if I as the chair know how a conference tends to flow and what kinds of facilities and audiences we have, then I can work within those parameters depending upon our goal. I could see us moving towards writing a book with various chapters in our current format, but at this point we need to develop a stronger team. I think that I will create some discussion tasks using these ideas for one portion of what is a long workshop time--for example using stations, or the think-pair-share/snowball!

Participant-led topic discussions usually are more productive than those where they have to listen to specialists. Format depends largely on the number of participants. For all discussions/ brainstorming/debating, etc. one facilitator can get the group to offer points of discussion on a specific topic(brainstorming)to start off. The facilitator writes down ALL IDEAS GIVEN without discussion at this point.   ( Often people with similar knowledge/interests  tend to focus on the same basic points ) The facilitator then  asks the group to briefly discuss the importance of every aspect and together decide which points will be discussed in order of importance. Divide the participants into groups o 5-10 members depending on the number of participants in the audience and let each take one or more topic to discuss in a limited time and write down their ideas that can later be presented by one from the group or by writing it on a poster sheet.  From this stage various methods can be used to move forward. If the points to discuss are too many for one session, divide them and decide how many will be discussed and how many sessions will be necessary. You can let the group add to or delete from each poster or idea  written down and ask for discussion of each idea.  If all participants have knowledge of the topic they can find solution s  and decide on what is the most important.  However at this stage a panel of specialists could also be involved in discussion of one topic at a time and offer solutions/answer questions from participants etc. until the group feels they have reached agreement on the different aspects. Make sure that definite points decided upon are listed and written down. This can be sent to all involved and added to or refined until the final product can be shared.

Dear Hetta,

I woke this morning realizing that I need a way to draw participants into the discussion and then just read your response! Creating topic groups and allowing audience members to join any of these groups will be very well-received, depending on the turnout that we get. I think the x factor for roundtable discussion is the number of attendees and how to involve them. Since ours is a small conference, we may be able to just have one large circle and invite guests to join one whole group... With these two alternatives, I think I am armed to finish the planning.... 

 Dear Mark and all,

Mark, First of all, I see that I need to do a lot of homework for the discussion that I am chairing! I hope that I will get favorable reviews...further, I think you have helped the discussion move towards the heart of the distinction between a roundtable and panel discussion format, at least for the conference that I am preparing for. That is, the roundtable discussion is a good vehicle for exploring territory with fairly knowledgeable members on a topic, or at least where each member brings knowledge to bear on a problem. The panel discussion is better suited to letting some experts present to a larger audience that is less knowledgable. Please correct or add to this if I am going awry. I just feel that a roundtable discussion format will not work if there are a lot of audience members who are discourse community outsiders. How would that work---an inside circle of experts and an outside circle of novices?

The problem with our conference is that it tends to draw smaller audiences of experts but offers only individual or panel presentations in the application boilerplate. That creates the wrong impression in the mind of the presenters who expect a large audience and then prepare for a standard series of teacher-fronted 20 minute presentations when having a roundtable discussion proposal format as a standard for the conference would create a more productive alternative. I think my next step is to work on or find a template version of a proposal submission and evaluation rubric that could be worked into our conference system. Evaluating the chair's knowledge of the topic would be a good element to add to the rubric.

Thanks for your help,

Paul Sevigny

Dear Paul Sevigny, it would help, a lot, to send specific structured questions to your guests and to have them answered by them in the round table. You have the control of aims and give total liberty to your guests, who can largely enrich  their answers. As a guest, I received the questions and felt quite good to provide the answers. Just consider that a question should be clear enough.  Best luck!

Dear Rafael, I love this plan. Thanks for the suggestion. I will work on that.

Paul

I have participated in a roundtab;e along the lines that Rafael suggests, and found it very useful. The co-chairs tailored the questions to each participant's background, and then the others were able to expand the ocus to add their own insignts. This way the co-chairs were ab;e to determine the focus, but in a way that alowed for cross-pollination.

Dear Colleagues, 

Thank you so much for all of your valuable advice on how to manage a roundtable discussion. It will be a tight schedule with so many gifted experts in our field, but with your counsel I will surely succeed. Best, Paul Sevigny

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/join-our-roundtable-discussion-apu-beppu-paul-sevigny

Hello Paul, I would love to know the results of round table discussions (1). Just out of curiosity, was this a requirement of RAPU? Such Zadankai (1) are popular in Japan with one topic focus per table. Usually short burst, intense discussions aimed at fleshing out an issue. However, sometimes they do not go deeply into a topic for fear of insulting the main expert on the table or not allowing identification of other experts on the table.

Lesley

Hi Lesley,

Actually, I am new to the Asia Pacific Conference at APU this year. Luckily I can say that APU is not typical in Japan in that the administration and faculty are open to change because we are a young university (just 15 years old), and we are very devoted to our work. We will go around and share personal stories--not about how Nichiren has improved our lives (lol)--but about how collaborating on EMI courses has gone, or how it might work better at various unis around Japan (not just here). In actuality, collaboration between English lecturers and professors of main departments in order to create graded English language materials is extremely time consuming, and so I am not sure we can boast of improved lives ( I imagine that to be zandankai.) Rather, creating openness and trust could build the means for faculty with complementary gifts to form new partnerships. I think it all really depends upon your topic. English Mediated Instruction (our topic) is still in infancy in many ways in Japan, so nurture is key. I tend to lean towards the collaborative friends approach over the critical friends approach that I see in the U.S.--definitely a different style.

Hi Paul,

     A key role to anchor is that of moderator of the discussion which is distinct from the typical paper respondent.  The moderator's role is to articulate as questions the themes that run throughout the various ideas presented.  So, the moderator formulates discussion questions that spring from all the researchers' ideas and contributions rather than critiquing each one.  Examples might include:  "What issues emerge across all these individual contributions?  What do these common concerns show us about what we do know in the field?  What do these common concerns indicate that we don't know, yet, about our field? 

As a member of the Cultural Studies Association, an organization which encourages alternative formats to the usual panel of presentations, I have led a number of seminar discussions over the years. I find the format to be much more conductive to an ongoing conversation throughout the conference. There are different ways to run such a seminar, but we might, for instance, read each other's papers in advance and then spend the time in a guided discussion of connections. Alternatively, we might all read certain assigned texts and then work to make a web of connections from those texts to our own work. You can look at the CSA website and cfp for other format models:

http://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/

And if you can have a look at the Brain Series discussions that were aired on Charlie Rose in a round-table (literally) format, you can see how effective these can be.

Maybe the srpinger format with APA references