Week 6 reflection

This week in the lecture I moved from grand strategy to talk about the home front, and began with the nine months of the ‘Bore War’. I was eager to highlight the gap between expectations and realities, the combination of preparation and ignorance with which the British approached the coming conflict, and the problems for the government of trying to mobilize the home front in the particular political, social and military conditions of 1939-40.

ProfHacker

In posts below, I’ve put together a kind of flow chart of ways to approach organising a seminar, and suggested some useful links. If you get into this as a subject, or you’re keen on the ways technology and education can intersect, or you just want to stun your lecturers with your insights on teaching, why not spend a while browsing through ProfHacker – a site that brings together tips on teaching, self-organisation and pure survival for the academic community?

Running seminars – a series

There are now six posts in this series – why not try to read one a day for the next week or over reading week?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Help…

My seminar group isn’t functioning…. My seminar as a whole isn’t working…. I get dissatisfied with the way other groups run the seminar…. I always/never speak and it’s winding me up.

Are these problems, and what can YOU do about them?

Running Seminars 5

If you’re following the steps laid out in this series of posts, you’ll by now have some ideas about how to prepare the seminar, convey information to students and encourage them to structure their knowledge. Now we’ll talk about something a bit different – getting students to think about key concepts and themes.

Running Seminars 4

As well as expanding the factual knowledge available to the seminar, you’ll also want to get them to put that knowledge to use, arranging it into new structures for analysis and argument. How can you encourage them to do this?

Running Seminars 3

So you now have a list of the ‘extras’ that you want to give to the seminar during the 50 minutes or so that you’re in charge. What techniques can you use to get them across? In this post, I’ll talk about the extra facts you’ve decided to deliver.

Running Seminars 2

You’ve had a look at some other sites to get an idea about how groups work. What next? Let’s assume for the moment that your group is starting to work well – you are communicating, you’re able to rely on the others to do some work, you’re preparing before the seminar. (I’ll post up later some suggestions about what to do if you think the group isn’t working). What stages should you work through before you decide what format the seminar will take?

Running seminars 1

I promised to come up with some ideas about how to run seminars better. As historians, our instinctive reaction to a problem is to see what we can read about it – fortunately, there’s a huge amount of writing about teaching and learning online, much of it excellent. Please pick at least one of the links in bold below, and think about how it relates to what we’re trying to achieve.

Week 5 Review

Grand strategy now completed as a topic, and whilst the impression I got from the seminars was that not everyone had got the chronology of events sorted out in their head, we have all grasped some big themes. In terms of this topic as a whole, I think that I should probably miss out the week at the start where I try to do the war as a whole, spend a week on the run up to war, then do 3 weeks on wartime strategy – that would allow me to give the weight that the early war needs without running out of time. But this will always be a difficult issue – as the documents we looked at in seminar suggested, the combination of enduring concepts and reaction to circumstances make strategy something you have to study both in the immediate and the long term.
I’d forgotten how much work needs to go into setting up the first primary source seminar, and in particular the need to emphasise that this is a learning process. Hopefully, today gave people a chance to work on the basics – what sort of document is this, who produced it (look at the DNB through Senate House for help), and what is the surrounding context (why not use the timelines here to help?). Next time, I think that I’ll get all groups to prepare one question for the rest to discuss, as a means of increasing interaction and preventing this seminar turning into a one-at-a-time journey round the table.
One of the sources we looked at today was a pair of Low cartoons. If you’re interested in using visual sources, you might like to look at Dr Rebecca Lewis’ Second World War poster site, with its associated blog.