By lunchtime I was getting tired. It had been a busy week.  There had been a series of dawn starts, including on Wednesady getting an early train to London for a two hour meeting at UCL: I had been involved in five continuous hours of significant meetings on Tuesday including chairing the University Executive Board in some tricky business around both future admissions targets and the Research Excellence Framework; I had been in discussions with visiting delegations, including one from the Confederation of British Industries and another from Nanjing University of Technology (and meetings where everything has to be translated are particularly tiring); and I had spoken at the evening launch in the city for an art event sponsored jointly by the University and a major law firm. I had spent this morning on an interview panel for a new senior appointment - a task always demanding full concentration.

By 5 o'clock I was totally revived and full of enthusiasm again,  What had brought me so fully back to life?

I spent the whole afternoon teaching my final year class.  Actually, I wasn't really teaching very much at all.  In the three hour class I had perhaps spoken for, in total, around 30 minutes. I wonder how this would count in David Willetts' obsession with contact hours?  Yes: I had been present, but the greatest contact the students had was with each other. Their learning was from what others were saying and doing, not from me.

This was the first session in my module where the students were presenting the results of their research and reflection.  Thirty-six students had been split into eight small groups and each given a particular issue to consider.  The overall theme was the transformation of cities in Central and Eastern Europe since the ending of communism twenty years ago.  I had set the topic up two weeks ago with a one hour lecture, illustrated by images and video clips, of city structures as they had been in the communist period and on the ideals of communist city planning. But today each small group of students had been asked to prepare a 10 minute Powerpoint presentation giving the results of their reflections on their own theme - the fate of the poor in the post-communist city, changes in the use and meaning of public space, and so on.

I have a very nice and motivated group this year (although rather more numerous than I ideally wanted - 24 rather than 36 would have been perfect).  And from the start of the very first presentation I knew this was going to be a great afternoon.  The first slides were clear, with a sensible blend of text and illustration; the two students who presented their group's thoughts spoke fluently without reading directly from a prepared text; they made eye contact with the audience; the academic content was well-structured.  The group as a whole has gelled enough for there to be questions and answers between the students at the end of each presentation.  A later group who approached their task largely through case studies produced an excellent summing up drawing general points from their examples (rather than just leaving it there, as I had started to fear they might).  Eight presentations should have taken around an hour and a half (allowing for some questions) but they overran significantly and I decided to abandon the lecture I had prepared as an introduction to the next seminar topic and instead add extra annotations to the Powerpoint I was intending to use, and put that on the MOLE2 page - which I have done.

At the end of the presentations we had a great discussion about what had worked and what had been less successful.  We also came up with several general points about post-communist urban transition.  I found out that many of the students had hardly any experience of making presentations and welcomed the opportunity to do so.  A number commented on the way out that it had been a fascinating afternoon, that they had learned a lot about a subject they knew little of, and they commented on high quality aspects of individual interventions.

So I felt that I had perhaps achieved more for the core reason behind the university this afternoon - student education - than in most of my other activities during the week.  But I hadn't been teaching: I had been facilitating their learning, largely through the way I had set the whole activity up.  It was a good feeling to end the afternoon on - although not the day, since I then went on to the retirement party for a senior colleague where I made a speech.  And for the third time in the week it was closer to 8 than 7 o'clock when I finally got home.

The dates for blogs in November all fall in the earlier part of the month - 1st, 3rd, 9th, 15th, 16th.