Making the Most of Seminars: Advice for Students

Seminars. A core component and learning environment in most university courses. Seminars and workshops are designed to test your knowledge on a given topic, and provide you with an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained in lectures to hypothetical scenarios. For example, you may be presented with a legal scenario to advise a hypothetical client on, a method of problem-based learning that I particularly use in my seminars. Problem-based learning provides you with the opportunity to test your ability in applying knowledge to practical scenarios and, in doing so, enables you to identify any gaps in your knowledge that you can then seek to develop after such sessions.

Seminars are accordingly a place to gain oral formative feedback from your peers and your seminar tutor and allow you to practice addressing assessment based questions/ questions that are relevant to the knowledge and skills you will need for your assessments and beyond; seminars are specifically designed to enable you to meet the learning objectives for a module, and thus allow you to meet the criterion of your assessments, and often are designed to enable you to develop employability skills in the process, such as your oral communication skills.

But how can you make the most of these sessions? How can you ensure you take full advantage of the learning benefits these sessions seek to provide? Below are some tips and advice on how to develop your knowledge and skillset through seminars and workshops:

1. Be sure that you prepare for your seminars in advance. Complete any required tasks and complete all required reading. The best way to make the most of these sessions is to come prepared. This will enable you to engage with seminar discussions and identify any gaps in your knowledge prior to the seminar that you would like to address or develop in the session. If you do not prepare, you cannot engage with the core learning tasks in the seminar and will be unable to gain formative feedback from your tutor on your approach to your tasks.
2. Similarly, ensure that you complete all tasks and attempt to answer all questions to the best of your ability, even if you don’t always fully grasp their requirements. Attempting to complete them will ensure that you are not passive in your seminars; the more involved you are, the more you can learn from these sessions. Seminars and the answers provided by your seminar tutor will make much less sense if you have not attempted to address the questions and apply the topic knowledge yourself first. Likewise, if all students come prepared, you can all engage with seminar discussions, thereby overcoming the seminar silence that many of us have experienced as both lecturers and students; the more you prepare and engage, the more learning benefits the group has to gain
3. Linked to this, please ensure that you engage with the tasks set in the seminar. For example, if your tutor asks you to undertake group work, engage with this to ensure you are learning from your peers and making a core contribution to the development of your learning. You cannot make the most of seminars if you are not actively participating in them
4. Ensure that you ask questions before, during, and after a seminar. Your seminar tutors are there to help and if you are struggling with a particular aspect of a topic, or the skills needed to answer a practice assessment question in the seminar, ask for help. The more you ask, the more your learning will be aided ahead of your assessments. If you are not comfortable asking your seminar tutor for help, be sure to engage with your peers instead to ensure all gaps in your knowledge are addressed
5. If there is a particular approach used in seminars that you do not agree with, such as being put on the spot to answer questions, please do speak to your seminar tutor about this so they can adapt their teaching practice and create a comfortable environment for you to learn and develop in; if we don’t know what we are doing wrong, we cannot fix this, so please do let us know if a teaching technique does not have its desired effect
6. Last, but not least, is ensuring that you are attending your seminars. There are often trends seen between student attendance and assessment grades, so be sure to attend your seminars and gain key tips and advice from your tutors that you do not necessarily receive in your lectures.