Thanks for all your help.
Regarding that class, the teacher had us move our desks in a semicircle every day, and each person had to say something about the assigned reading. After that, people could voice agreements, arguments, or really anything about the subject matter or someone else's statement. The teacher would usually only guide the discussion if it was starting to go off on a tangent, or we were missing an important point. Depending on the part of the semester, the reading could have contained anything from Plato to Aquinas. The Greek philosophers were the beginning of the