Academic Skills Workshops
What's on Offer?
| Workshop | Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading under pressure (we all have to) | 6 February 2012 | 13:00-15:00 | N106 |
| Writing critically (not descriptively) | 13 February 2012 | 13:00-15:00 | N205 |
| Sorting out Group Dynamics | 20 February 2012 | 15:00-17:00 | R147 |
| Tips for giving a relaxed and scholarly presentation | 27 February 2012 | 14:00-1600 | N106 |
| Getting Structure in Writing | 5 March 2012 | 16:00-18:00 | R110 |
| Common Slips in Academic Writing | 12 March 2012 | 14:00-16:00 | N106 |
| Exam preparation – practical strategies | 23 April 2012 | 17:00 - 19:00 | M043 |
*There has to be some overlap between the writing workshops. Please consider this and choose specifically for your needs, rather than block-book.
Students working on their dissertations are advised to consider attending the Critical Writing workshop on.....
Getting ‘Critical Analysis’ into Your Writing: Monday 13 February 2012
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Have you been told across modules that you don’t have an argument, that your essays are too narrative, or you don’t have much analysis going on in your work? Does it seem like a barrier you cannot get over?
This workshop could help you get break through. It is a practical, hands-on session in parts, so you are going to need to bring with you a bit on any essay you are working on now where you have referred to a secondary source. Bring the secondary source (article or book chapter) along with you too.
This session is aiming to progress your work on that assignment. If you can’t bring this don’t worry; bring a couple of marked essays instead and a text you intend to read for an upcoming assignment.
Sorting out Group Dynamics: Monday 20 February 2012
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Are you sometimes a little frustrated with your seminars? Perhaps you sometimes feel that you are contributing loads and others are giving very little, OR you may feel you are quieter because it is quite hard to get your thoughts out there and into a discussion. Too much could go wrong! If so, this workshop could help change things for you.
The aim is for all students to get a lot more out of their seminars and see them for what they are – intellectual party time - where everyone is an intellect in his or her own right (or you wouldn’t be in uni). If you can feed each other with proactive support as well as intellectually, you can transform your seminars into irreplaceable learning experiences. That takes skill - a highly employable and sought after skill.
In this workshop you will learn how to spot fairly quickly, when you are placed into a group situation, how the group’s dynamics are working. You will learn how to put this insight to use in discreet ways - to initiate and nurture efficient learning democracies inside those groups. This is a skill you will value well beyond higher education and perhaps in and beyond the work place too.
Tips for giving a relaxed and scholarly group or individual presentation: 27 February 2012
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This workshop is for anyone who has a problem with organisation and nerves when asked to present to a larger group. This workshop may not remove all your nerves but it will put in your hands some practical strategies for managing them. And it will show you how to put together a presentation that is well mapped out. A map to hold on to does tend to make us feel safer and more in control, and you can make the map as detailed as you like. In this workshop, all participants will first be given strategies for supporting each other, and no one will be forced to present anything. There will be practical exercises to try out (if you want to) that explore:
1. The value of certain kinds of audience-engagement in presentations. (How to get the kind you want.)
2. Eye-contact, pacing, visuals, teamwork/organisation and preparation, and body-language when you are presenting.
3. Why and how not to read off a script.
4. Handovers and teamwork practice for group presentations.
5. Mindsets for dealing with nerves and other student and tutor suggested strategies.
6. How to peer-review the presentations of colleagues.
7. Dealing with questions after the presentation.
Structure in Writing : 05 March 2012
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Do you feel you get lost sometimes in essays and don’t quite know what should come next or why, when you are writing? This session could help you out. It offers some easy ways to fly up out of the writing from time to time, to see the bigger picture, and let your essay tell you how it would like to be structured. For this workshop, it’s best to bring along at least a couple of your essays (marked). Together, we’ll scan how many ways different subject tutors all refer to structure in their feedback. Also, we will look more deeply into your essays, and it is likely you will see after this workshop how a clear, simple structure in your essay may have been shouting its presence to you, but you just couldn’t see it at the time.
Here’s what we will be trying out together:
- Thinking like a tutor when you mark (that’s the easy part for this session on structure, but you cannot do without it).
- Assessing work for repetition, irrelevance and internal cohesion (that’s just the logical sequence of your thinking processes expressed in good enough English).
- Constructing an introduction. (It has three functions.)
- Refining the map in the introduction to make it a richer outline of the learning journey you have made in the main body. (A joy to tutors – because it lights up the way for them to come along behind you too.)
- Constructing a thesis statement (your overarching opinion/insight when your learning journey is finished – we’ll look at the language you need for this thesis statement).
- Four functions of a conclusion. We will offer you some straightforward, functional language for each of these four to start you off.
Common Slips in Academic Writing 12 March 2012
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Do parts of your feedback from tutors ever look something like this?
"your language use needs urgent attention" "your way of expressing yourself is problematic" "you have yet to develop an academic style appropriate to the level for which you are writing" "you are very informal in your writing" "you have clear difficulties with spelling and punctuation which you should address"
Look familiar? Then come and find out more exactly what tutors really mean, and what you do can about it right now with some quick and easy strategies.
Exam Preparation – Practical Strategies: 23 April 2012
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Practical strategies are needed to help you relax and organise yourself for exams. This workshop will give you some ideas for making a plan you could comfortably stay with.It will also give you some specific techniques not just forgetting into the mind of an examiner butfor simultaneously reducing your stress levels while increasing your critical thinking skills. You will need to bring with you a couple of primary or secondary sources you've readover the course of the year and we'll try out these techniques. You won't be alone either; others will help you develop and practice these strategies.Bring along a couple of past papers too if you can - these are our toys. If you dont know how or where to find these, ask your tutor in the seminar, or use the seminar to ask everyone - through the tutor.