Not done this sort of research myself, but a girl in my office recruited focus group/diary participants by putting up posters in supermarkets (her research is into healthy eating) and round the university. She also had gift tokens for our local shopping centre as incentives. I think she offered £10 for doing a 1hr focus group plus another £50 for keeping a 4-week food diary and an interview at the end. Pretty costly but she had a lot of takers.

Hi,

I read a book about leading group discussions recently which suggested this can happen if students think that a) when the teacher asks a question the teacher will answer it themselves if no one else does, or b) that there are a few students who will always answer so the rest don't have to. So, although it's really difficult, I think you need to try not to answer your own questions and go off onto a monologue.

2 things I have tried which have been quite successful are starting the seminar with some straightforward questions with an obvious answer - factual rather than conceptual. That way the students can ease into the dicsussion and get used to the idea of speaking, while not having to risk a personal opinion. Secondly, have some whiteboard oriented 'brainstorming' sessions where either the whole group shouts out suggestions and you write them on the board (has the advantage that each answer seems to carry the same weight so even someone shy can say something and see it written on the board as a 'valid' answer) or get them in groups of 2 or 3, set them a question and then ask them to choose a 'spokesperson' from each group who will report back. That way the confident people will still tend towards the 'spokesperson' roles but at least the quiet students get the chance to talk in their small groups while you're not listening.

If it's the same few people talking each time, you could try the old "thanks Jane, you've made lots of valuable contributions so far, can anyone else think of an answer?" chestnut.

Try not to get hung up on getting every single student to talk though - some people just seem determined not to speak, either because they are painfully shy, too cool for school, or just can't be bothered to engage their brains. I used to really stress about these students and think that I had to bust a gut getting them 'engaged' but there's only so much you can do. Plus there's the other extreme - I talked to a friend of mine about some quiet students in a group we both teach and he replied "I just pretend they don't exist"...

My research design was quite iterative - I knew I wanted to do an ethnography, but I didn't know early on what I wanted to find out so I just went off for 2 months, kept a fieldwork diary, photocopied every document I saw and got contact details for everyone I met. Then I spent about 8 months reflecting on the ethnography and reading, in order to develop some research questions. Then, at the start of year 2, I began in-depth interviews which were focused on my new research questions. Needless to say, the way my thesis has ended up does not resemble my initial proposal very closely, except for the fact that I wanted to study the civil service up close and personal.

I think, if you can, be as flexible as possible. You might find, for example, that having done a few interviews the same few themes come out again and again so before doing any more interviews, you can modify your questions to address these themes. Also, I found that (although this might be more true of ethnography than other research methods), when I came to write up my 'data chapters' this steered my thesis in a slightly different way to the one I was expecting because I preferred to let the data 'lead' me rather than attempting to fit the data rigidly around my research questions.

Hi Twinkle,

Sorry to hear you're having a difficult time at the moment, but maybe there are some practical solutions to your problems. Although you have mentioned computer and payment issues, maybe it's significant that you're halfway through your phd - I'd say there are a lot of us on here who would agree this is a difficult stage to be at when all the enthusiasm of the first year has worn off and only the reality of a lot of hard work remains. Is it possible that the computer problems are part of a more general lack of enthusiasm for work at the moment? If so, my only advice is to stick with it and keep doing some work - however little - until your interest resumes. I had my own 2nd year crisis and got to the point where I told my supervisors I was thinking about quitting; thankfully they were able to talk me out of it and I'm now well on the way to finishing. Quitting after so much work is a major decision and not something, in my opinion, which should rest on your access to computers and payment problems.

But to go back to your post, if it's getting you down having to deal with admin staff and IT staff is there any possibility of working from home for a while? Sometimes being out of the situation, especially if there is a lot of office politics or resentment, can help you get a sense of perspective. With regard to payments, I think irregular payment is a fact of life unfortunately - my ESRC payments are pretty random. I think talking to your mortgage provider, rather than the university, might be more effective because there's pretty much nothing the university can do about it. I don't know what your situation is but could you take on some teaching assistant work? This would bring in some extra income (and in my experience it's paid quickly, a couple of weeks after you put a claim in) and maybe doing something academic, but not thesis-related, would help you deal with/forget about your other problems.

Heifer

Thanks for all your replies - I'm really encouraged both by those who are finding teaching difficult and those who seem to have cracked it...

I like this suggestion but with my groups, I already feel they have a *lot* of work to do. For this one module, they have 2x 2500 word essays, 2x2 hour "simulations" where they have to role-play a select committee hearing (how much fun does that sound! :p) and a multiple choice exam. When I did an almost identical module at the start of my bachelors degree we had 2x 1500 word essays and a written exam at the end - a much lighter workload at a supposedly "better" university. So far, they've been pretty good at doing the reading (I set them one journal article and three starter questions for each seminar) and I don't want to overload them and risk them not turning up because they haven't done the work.



I'm starting to see this in my groups now, too. In the first week, when nobody knew each other, the discussion in small groups worked really well because the students could talk about a concrete topic and get to know each other a little. This week, now that some friendships have been formed, I noticed a lot of chat about football and facebook creeping in... Might introduce a bit of enforced moving around to stop this happening next time.

Ideelind - that is exactly how I feel! Getting the balance right between making the sessions 'fun' and actually ensuring that they are critically engaging with some serious material is my biggest worry. In my last session I tried to break the hour up into a few different activities like small group discussions and full group discussions but I did come away worrying that I had been to lenient and made things too light hearted. I recall reading an article in the Times Higher where a lecturer said "I don't need to be the students' friend - they've got friends already" and I sort of agree - but on the other hand I was an undergraduate myself not so long ago and remember how some tutors were just hated for no real reason and everyone sat in a sulky silence totally unwilling to co-operate!

I also feel that I don't know enough about the basics to be able to answer their questions - for example, the seminar I'm leading on Thursday will be covering voting behaviour and electoral systems - something that I last read about in the 1st year of my undergrad degree, 7 years ago! I feel like my level of knowledge is only slightly higher than that of the students and it really panics me. I'm frantically trying to read some textbooks and feel like I'm revising for an exam or something.

My supervisors keep insisting that I will have some really "fulfilling" teaching sessions which will make it all worthwhile but I honestly can't see how this will ever happen.

Sorry don't know why it randomly says "professional bodies" at the end of my post!

Hi Rockstar,

In my experience conferences are events usually lasting at least one day where people present papers and/or posters about their research. Workshops tend to be smaller and have a combination of presentations and discussion or just discussion. Having said that 'workshop' is a bit of an unhelpful term as it can cover everything from mini-conferences on a very specific theme to more general discussion groups. Some good places to start to look for conferences are if your field has any professional bodies (I can only speak for my own area, politics, but we have things like the Political Studies Association, International Political Studies Association etc). You can join these bodies as a student and receive updates on conferences, research etc but they usually have websites where you can find that sort of stuff for free.

Another option is to join a relevant mailing list. If you go to www.jiscmail.ac.uk there is a 'find lists' column down the right hand side of the page - search for your field and a whole bunch of options will come up for mailing lists you can join. Again, I am on a 'British politics' list and an 'Interpretation and methods' list - people use them to have debates via email but they are a great way of finding out when conferences and workshops are happening. Might be a good idea to set up a specific folder in your email which they will be diverted to because sometimes you do get a bit bombarded with emails!

Also sometimes conferences are advertised in journals, particularly if they are the annual conference in a particular field.

As for smaller workshops, if you know of a particular university or research centre in your field which does relevant stuff, check their website regularly and join an email alert list if possible because they will often post details of workshops and conferences on there before they are more widely advertised.

professional bodies

I spent 2 months of the first year doing preliminary fieldwork (social science phd) then wrote two chapters - a 'history of institutions' chapter and a lit review chapter (which was more like 'history of ideas'). They were both around 12,000 words each. I'm now in the third year and haven't looked at these chapters since year 1 because my supervisors take the line of write a draft, put it aside and move on, then we can put the whole thing together at the end and see what needs re-writing. I would say that the lit review chapter is basically ok because the focus of the thesis hasn't changed too much, but the first chapter will need a lot of re-writing because I have since decided to take an interpretive approach to the research so the tone of the first chapter is all wrong. And although I think the leave-it-to-the-end approach is ok, I am a bit disheartened about having to start from the beginning and do a lot more writing... it's quite hard to summon up enthusiasm this far down the line, especially if it means getting the same books out that I was reading years ago!

As to sending stuff to them, they only wanted to see stuff when there was a full draft in place, before then I was asked to summarise my thinking for them so we could discuss the general direction each chapter was going in. That suits me quite well because I *hate* sending unfinished drafts - I'm a bit of a perfectionist!

To answer the OP, at my university the 1st year progression process (actually, it happens at the end of each year) consisted of submitting a piece of work (1 chapter of the thesis - usually literature review) and a list of all the training courses attended. I then had an interview with the person who had read my submission and we discussed my work to date, what i was particularly pleased with/ concerned about, my professional development, my satisfaction with supervision etc. Then we discussed how I planned to progress with the work over the following year. It lasted about 2 hours. After the interview, the assessor wrote a report about my progress. It's all treated as a bit of a formality here, as it is quite rare for anyone to not be allowed to progress. I assume it is the same at your university as your supervisor hasn't mentioned anything about it to you, but it's definitely worth finding out. Are there any 2nd/3rd years you can ask?

As to finishing the bulk of your phd research in a year... I'm trying not to be blinded by jealousy as a third year with a lot of work still to do but I would agree with the other posts that it really isn't likely that something of passable doctoral standard can be written in so short a time period. Without wanting to sound like a luvvie, doing a PhD is as much about making a journey through different perspectives and methods as it is about getting some results and writing a report. It's admirable to recognise that the 'originality' of a PhD is much less important than some people think - as long as *some* contribution has been made to the field, it doesn't have to be world changing - but there is a danger of underestimating what originality consists of. At the end of the day it is not the individual student's perception of his/her contribution which matters but those of the examiners, and it's going to take some confidence to walk into a viva and say "I haven't done anything new, but what's the point, if it will be out of date in a few years' time?"!

Hi Shani,

I agree with Rosy - it's essential that you have some proper supervision for your third year, and that you make sure your supervisor realises which year you are in. There are plenty of useless supervisors around (one of my original supervisors, who I have now dropped, once stopped me in the corridor and asked me who my supervisors were... replying "you, actually" was pretty embarrassing!) but in those cases you need to assert yourself even more than usual. Perhaps you could send an email (often easier than face to face) and say something like "Following our discussion today, it occurs to me that you may not be aware I am now in the third year of my studies. In light of this, do you think we need to arrange a second supervisor to help me during your absence?". Ok, it's ridiculously formal - i'm bad at emails - but it's just a suggestion.

most importantly, don't be too hard on yourself. Getting a PhD is not meant to be either an easy ride or an impossible slog. It's periods of success and failure, with a good supervisor to give advice throughout. It sounds like you have done a lot of work already - try to stay focussed on that and gather some energy to carry on.

Ps thanks smoobles - I had a friend as an undergrad who had genuine anxiety attacks at the thought of doing presentations, with a medical note and all the rest, but our tutor told her to 'get over it' and stop trying to find excuses not to do the work! Guess I just don't want to fall into the insensitive idiot trap.

I totally agree that interactive methods are the way forward, wherever possible. I try to include a mixture of small group discussion, whole-group discussion, and writing-notes-on-a-handout activities to keep it interesting. I've also found a great book called 'Discussion as a way of teaching' by S Brookfield and S Preskill which has a lot of tips on getting discussion started, especially for people like me who freak out if they ask a question in class and don't get an answer!

As to teaching a topic close to your own research interests, i can see pros and cons. I teach a masters module which is quite close to my research topic, and find it quite frustrating when the students don't share my enthusiasm for it (surely everyone finds the civil service riveting :p). On the other hand, when I student writes an assignment on a topic close to my own interests I get a real buzz out of reading their ideas and discussing it with them. Then there are the dreaded 'research methods' modules...the students all hate them and getting them to turn up when the seminar is not about 'their' method is a nightmare. Strangely, I find the research methods classes quite easy to teach, because I don't feel I have an emotional investment in them.

Both me and a fellow student who have just started our third years are being pressured by our supervisors to submit in MARCH next year - i.e. 2 years 5 months in! We both think it's a preposterous idea and are feeling totally confused about the whole business. The supervisors can't really give any justification for why they want us to meet such a daft deadline other than that it will 'give us time to do other things'. Our university regulations state that students aren't allowed to submit before 3 full years have passed, to which supervisors replied - just get it printed and bound and leave it on a shelf until the deadline passes! I can't think what possible reasons there could be for this sudden pressure. Any ideas?

The whole faculty got a lecture from the Dean last week about the fact that the regulations about paying fees for 'writing up' have changed. At out uni there is no longer a 'writing up year' but either "pending submission" (4th year) or "extended submission" (5th year). The fees for these years are £500/£2000 for the 4th year depending on whether you need labs or not; and a £2000 flat fee for everyone in their 5th year. When asked to justify raising the fee for 5th years the Dean had no answer other than "it shouldn't take anyone that long to do a PhD".

Hi everyone,

I've just come back from my first seminar of the new semester - teaching 20 1st year undergraduate Politics students. Was up at 5 am today panicking! I'm trying to build up my teaching experience - because I will inevitably have to teach in the future in an academic job - but I *hate* it. It involves everything that I'm bad at - generalist knowledge, being confident in front of a group of strangers, leading discussion. The irony is that I love doing conference presentations but am petrified in front of a room full of 18 year olds!

The seminar went ok today but during it, I asked one of the students to write on the whiteboard as the others shouted out answers. Afterwards I started to panic that this was the wrong thing to do as the student might have been dyslexic or had another reason for not wanting to write on the board. Am I being totally paranoid?

Would anyone else like to share their teaching experiences - or offer words of wisdom on how to make it more enjoyable?