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This is related to "Skimming through a math paper with a group" and "What do professors gain out of teaching reading courses with individual Ph.D students", but from the other side :)

I've experimented with various ways to run my advanced Ph.D seminar, ranging from almost-lectures to "students present papers" to "students present textbook-level material" to "let's all work on a problem together". I don't think any of them have really worked to my satisfaction in the sense of ending the semester feeling that students have a command (as opposed to knowledge) of the material.

I've been reading about the Oxford tutorial style approach, which can crudely be approximated by:

  • professor assigns reading material once a week
  • students form pairs and meet with professor once a week for about 1-1.5 hours.
  • students run the meeting (maybe one person presents and the other critiques, or they work out shared portions of the material on the board). Professor keeps quiet as far as possible except to unblock.

This format sounds tempting, as something that might work with a small group (at most 10 people). Does anyone have experience with this format and would it be suitable for advanced material at the graduate level ?

While I'm hoping it doesn't matter too much for this discussion, the topics for the seminar would be in theoretical computer science.

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As a student I can say that my favorite variant of reading groups (in terms of forcibly maximizing what I learn) is the: students present and discuss papers together guided by pointed questions from the prof; at the end of the semester each student is expect to produce an independent mini-survey on some specific set of papers/topic (often a list of papers/topics is available from the prof, but other related suggestions welcome) – Artem Kaznatcheev Mar 18 '12 at 20:11
A tutorial with one or two students can work very well. But that's a completely different animal to a tutorial with ten students. The success of the former does not translate directly to the latter; you have to run the latter in a completely different way. So, which do you want to do? If you want tutor ten at a time, then Oxford-style is an irrelevant distraction, I'm afraid. – EnergyNumbers Sep 22 '12 at 6:16

1 Answer

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I have seen reading seminars done like this: in the beginning of the semester, professor publishes a full list of papers + a little extra that (s)he wants to cover. Each student then picks a paper or two and the date when they will present it. Then the student reads the paper, prepares a presentation on it, and speaks about it to the rest of the group. Presentation can be formal or informal (depending on the size of the class) and encourage other students to ask questions about the material. What I like about this approach is that 1) students get to pick a paper that will engage them 2) they have to read it and understand it so that they could present it to the group and be able to answer questions about it.

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that's how I run the seminars right now. the problem is that often only the presenter has read the material, and there's little discussion. – Suresh Mar 19 '12 at 1:53
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in this reading group, people usually showed up with papers printed out, so that they could follow what the presenter was talking about. that made asking questions easier (can mark in the paper, read in depth and ask if speaker understands the problem better). also - providing criticisms and "what would you do better" attitude usually spurs discussions easily – lynxoid Mar 20 '12 at 22:24
I have done this (as a student) and I can't say I took anything away from the others' presentations. It was more about showing the faculty you can prepare a presentation given academic material, less about learning in a group. – Raphael Sep 22 '12 at 9:25

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