Monthly Archives: February 2019

How to get the most out of a study group: Fae Horsley

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For this week’s blog post, Fae Horsley, one of the Student Feedback and Evaluation Interns working on the module, has written some tips on how to get the most out of a study group. Fae is a third year student here in the School of English so she’s had lots of time to perfect this! Don’t forget to sign up for Fae and Hulian’s focus group, which is taking place this Friday, 12-1 in ARMB.G.13 — check your email for more information.

Groupwork is something that we are all familiar with. At some point in your education, you will have had to work with others. But it’s unlikely you will have had to work in anything like a university study group. Not only do you have to work with your study group regularly, but you have to organise it, and an assessment mark may depend on it. As a third year English Literature student, I have had some amazing study groups, and some study groups which have fallen apart within a manner of weeks. Therefore, I am here to impart a little wisdom to you all by providing you with my top tips to make a study group work.

  1. DON’T LEAVE IT LAST MINUTE

The last minute scramble to get work done is something we are all familiar with. However, although this is a possible (if unadvised) work ethic for an individual, it is near impossible to get group work done if it is last minute. Trying to contact people who have different schedules/ timetables to you, and trying to get some sort of contribution/ work out of them, is more difficult than simply meeting up earlier on in the week. So make sure you meet up a few days before the work is due and then you don’t have to worry about it.

  1. MEET AT LUNCH OR HAVE SNACKS

This is a personal favourite of mine (maybe because I love food so much). But I find that if everyone is snacking or drinking coffee then people are generally happier; making for a better group dynamic and better groupwork.

  1. BE UNDERSTANDING

It can be very easy to feel frustrated if a study group member is consistently absent. If you consider this is a real cause of concern for your study group, then please tell your seminar leader. However, more often than not, absence is not malicious and a little empathy can go a long way. Remember that you may not be aware of what is happening in someone’s personal life. So, although it is important to try and contribute every week, don’t be too hard on your peers if they miss a week of study group.

  1. GET TO KNOW YOUR STUDY GROUP

You are going to be working with these people for the entire duration of a module; so get to know them! Being friends with your study group makes the whole study group process a lot more fun and relaxed.

  1. DON’T RELY ON FACEBOOK/ WHATSAPP

One week, it might be impossible for everyone to meet up (though, let’s be honest, finding an hour spare between you should not be that difficult). Therefore, you all turn to your best friend – social media. Though this can be useful to share ideas and do study group work, you will actually find that more often than not you spend way more time waiting around for someone to reply than it would take to actually just meet. Meeting is not just better because it is easier, but also because it makes communication far more effective!

  1. DO THE READING/ BE READY TO CONTRIBUTE

Having one member of your group stay silent the whole time because they haven’t done the reading is such a waste of valuable contribution. You are in groups precisely because of the value that is put upon EVERYONE’S idea, not just the individual’s. So make sure you do the reading, so you don’t sit there like a lost lemon for an hour.

I hope these tips help and that you all have great study groups this semester!

Lecturers – They’re just like us!

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I heard a radio piece about a research study into the role that gender plays in the willingness of academics to speak up during seminars some weeks ago, and I thought it would make a great post for this blog. The thing that really drew me to this particular example, was the fact that the paper was about staff seminars rather than seminars for students — yes, we also attend seminars in order to learn more about one another’s research. And I think it’s important for all of you to know that the same anxieties and inhibitors are working on us, just as they sometimes do their work on you. I described this to my colleague Kirsten Macleod and she said, ‘oh, you want to write a “Stars! They’re Just Like Us!” piece’.

I have probably already exposed myself as someone who loves a bit of celebrity by showing the David Oyelowo youtube video in my Wednesday lecture, so naturally I jumped on Kirsten’s idea. Lecturers – we’re just like you!

The piece of research that I’ve linked to in this post examines the role that gender plays in individual staff member’s willingness to ask questions, and it finds that men tend to ask more questions than women. This is no great surprise. But it’s interesting to learn that the order in which people ask their questions really makes a difference — so if a women asks the first question, other women are more likely to speak up as a result of this. Also, the longer the questioning lasted, the more likely women were to make a contribution. (I’ve recently discovered that ‘slow to warm up’ is a recognised form of shyness.) Here’s what the research paper has to say:

women audience members asked absolutely and proportionally fewer questions than male audience members. Men and women differed in the importance they attributed to different factors preventing them from asking questions, with women rating internal factors (e.g., not working up the nerve) as more important than men. Furthermore, our observations indicated that the gender of the first person to ask a question predicted the gender imbalance in subsequent questions, with proportionally fewer questions asked by women when a man was the first to ask a question. A longer time for questions was associated with less of an imbalance…

Of course gender is certainly not the only possible inhibiting factor, but it’s useful to remember that barriers to participation are very real and that they are not restricted only to the experience of being a student. We all need to be more aware of making room for one another, and perhaps the way to do that is for all of us to think a little less about ourselves and how we’re feeling in the moment. Maybe instead we can flip that on its head by trying to notice what everyone else in the room is doing and what we could do to support that.