I spent the morning getting ready for teaching my final year option - the first class of which will be on the Friday afternoon at the end of the first week of the semester.  I have to leave it relatively late before actually setting the week-by-week schedule because there are so many other things that come into my diary.  This year it looks as if I will be able to teach every session bar one - and that will be on a day when I will be viting CITY College in Thessaloniki and, appropriately, a Greek member of staff will take over with the class for that afternoon.

Already I am relishing seeing the effects of changes I will make as a result of lessons learned (by me) last session.  For instance, last year I experimented with running a formal debate on a particular issue - stating that the European parliament was considering legislating on ethnic equality rights. But that did not work because I held the assumption that students would have some notion of how a formal debate (such as in the House of Commons) worked - in reality they had no idea whatsoever of procedure, and no confidence in role playing within the structure I had set up.   This year I am changing the topic of that afternoon a little and will ask groups of students to make a pitch on their suggested policies for promoting community cohesion in the UK, based on their reading and evaluation of policies in other European countries.  And I have persuaded a recent Masters student who works in a policy consultancy to come to listen to the student groups and to give her reactions to them to give a flavour of how it is to make a pitch to an audience that has decision-making powers over whether to implement something or not.  There will also be changes to other sessions within the module - but one will remain as it has been over recent years, and that is the session on the break-up of former Yugoslavia where I get pairs or small groups of students to role play each of the main protagonist groups to explain to a new European Commissioner what happened and what the unfinished business still is.

What often disappoints me is that students are reluctant to move outside the comfort zone of the teaching and learning methods they have experienced to date - and these are third years.  There seems to me often to be both a strong element of risk aversion in our students, and a lack of self-confidence to project themselves as individuals who can stand out in the crowd.  I expect final year students to be preparing to enter the labour market and to try their hand at new things - and I am prepared to challenge them with a variety of learning methods.  In most years they thank me afterwards for having goaded them to think more than they have often done before, but they also complain that because my classes are different week by week and generally involve them in very active roles they end up with fewer notes than they feel comfortable with.  They need reassurance that they can learn by doing rather than by being talked to by me. I wonder if my reactions are shared by lecturers in other departments.

I shall report in a month or two on how it is going with this year's group of 27 students.