Student Perspective: Teaching at Summer School

The programme of courses and the teaching style at LSE are intensive and based in research, but are also friendly to international students whose first language is not English. As a student who does not study in the UK, I want to discuss the teaching style at LSE, and what I learnt from the academic portion of my experience.

First of all, the structure of the teaching - my course was made up of before-class reading, morning lectures and afternoon seminars. Within the seminars, we discussed relevant readings and with our class teachers help, were able to pick out the most relevant knowledge of the course from the material. Morning lectures gave us the chance to understand the theory of each topic, while the afternoon seminars let us recap what we’d learnt, output our understandings, discuss our thoughts, and use them to analyse related research questions. I really appreciated the arrangement of the course, as the acquisition of knowledge was more easily consolidated for me with the circulation of input, recap and output.

More importantly, I feel more than grateful to my teachers. In addition to their teaching expertise, they were always kind and endeavoured to include their students in class. As a student who hadn’t experienced full English lessons, I was very nervous. However, in my first class, my lecturer Dr. Plantin was considerate of his audience, talking slowly and pronouncing each word in a clear way. Meanwhile, my seminar teacher, Abel Guerra, encouraged us to express our perspectives by sharing his own experience of being a non-native English speaker. I learned from him that making mistakes doesn’t matter, and that is sometimes the only way to improve ourselves. Thanks to them, I ended up participating in every class actively and learned more than I ever thought by discussing the topics with teachers and classmates.

 

This blog was written by one of our 2023 Student Ambassadors, who are here to share their stories and help you understand the summer school experience at LSE.