Thinking that I should be explicit about how I define good participation in a seminar that I’m teaching, I circulated these eight criteria:

• Being responsive to other students. (Responsiveness needn’t always be immediate, verbal, or occur within the class discussion itself.)
• Building on others’ contributions, and sometimes making links among different people’s contributions or between what they have said and the text.
• Demonstrating genuine respect for the others, where respect does not require agreement. (In fact, sometimes respect requires explicit disagreement because you take the other person’s ideas seriously.)
• Focusing on the topic and the texts, which does not preclude drawing unexpected connections beyond them.
• Taking risks, trying out ideas that you don’t necessarily endorse, and asking questions that might be perceived as naive or uninformed.
• Seeking truth or clarity or insight (instead of other objectives).
• Exercising freedom of speech along with a degree of tact and concern for the other people.
• Demonstrating responsibility for the other students’ learning in what you say (and occasionally by a decision not to speak).

Students also privately wrote how they will assess themselves. Their assessments will be for their reflection alone–I won’t ever see them.

See also: responsiveness as a virtue; what makes conversation go well (a network model); and network dynamics in conversation.