Here are some possible tutorial topics to use with your
MSc students. Feel free to use any/all/none of them.
They are a combination of Ross Reynolds’ and Robin
Hogan’s original guidelines, along with a few new suggestions based on student
and staff feedback (and the misleadingly titled “53 Interesting Things To Do In
Your Seminars And Tutorials”). Suggestions are broadly split into the following
catagories:
·
Introductory ideas.
These are “ice breaker” type
exercises, or subjects which need to be covered in the first few weeks.
·
General discussion topics. If the
students are not forthcoming in suggesting topics for discussion, here are some
ideas which could be used.
·
Specific discussion topics. Or
“atmospheric fundamentals.” These are more academic discussion topics, which may
well involve you, or preferably, your students working through problems at the
whiteboard.
·
Transferable skills ideas. These
are exercises which can help students develop various non-Met specific skills.
Get each student to introduce themselves to the group, where they come from, what their first degree was in, why they’re studying the course, particular meteorological topics of interest, etc. If you have overseas students, it can be interesting to get them to summarise the weather/climatology in their home country. The tutor can introduce themselves and briefly describe their research interests, courses they teach, etc. Some tutors have found that the initial meeting works better on an individual, rather than a group, basis. It’s also nice to give a general overview of the different research groups within Met, what an academic actually spends their time doing, etc.
Explicitly lay out what you hope
students will get out of the tutorials and what you expect of them. This may
include outlining that tutorials will be focussed on broader student
development (the majority of students want tutors to answer course-specific
problems, but some tutors feel this replicates the role of module problem
classes. Regardless, how such
problems should generally be approached/broken-down/answered is a good tutorial topic). Also that it
is better if tutorials and the topics for discussion are to some degree
“student lead,” rather than entirely imposed from above by the tutor. It is
also important to ascertain what the students hope to get out of the tutorials.
Ask the students to give an impromptu summary of their undergraduate
project (or other equivalent research project). This can be particularly useful
if one or more of the students is reluctant to actively participate in the
tutorials. Students will put
together short presentations as part of Research and Communication Skills, but
practice in the tutorial small-group environment is very useful for building
confidence.
Don’t forget to look at Ken’s
summaries opposite his office; the evidence for climate change versus
statistical uncertainty can be a useful stimulus for discussion. This should be in the first three weeks,
before the field trip.
Equipment is left in lab for
demonstration and trying out - Stephen Gill or Andy Lomas are usually available
to help and it can avoid embarrassment to find out how to operate the equipment
first! The equipment is best demonstrated in the car park, then get the
students to estimate how much the pressure should drop at the top of the
building (after the first week or two they should have covered the hydrostatic
equation). Then go up to the roof via one of the spur staircases (you can use
your office door key) and see if they were right using the pressure sensor. You
can also show them the Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder, and get them to make
a cloud observation. This should be in
the second or third weeks as it is important for the smooth running of the
Dorset field trip.
Encourage the students to discussion their post-MSc plans and discuss the various career options open to them. Describe how second-term module and MSc project choices can help them towards any career goals they do have. Who in the department might be able to run a project in their topic of interest, etc. Beyond the MSc, would internships help?
Assisting the students in getting to grips with the lecture material is one of the main purposes of the tutorials, so it can be a good idea to ask the students each week if there is something that they want to discuss or have explained to them. If you are not comfortable answering such questions on the spot, ask them to e-mail a few days ahead with questions/issues. This will give you time to do a bit of research or speak with the relevant module convenor. If they never come up with anything then it is worth probing their understanding with some of the questions in the “specific discussion topics” section.
2.2 WCD or departmental
seminars
Ask students to outline the main points of the weekly WCD or departmental seminars, what they thought about them, what they did/didn’t understand, is there are jargon you can explain o them, etc. To get the most out of this discussion, it might be best to forewarn the students or your plans, so they can take notes (and turn up!). Encourage them to look past the nitty-gritty detail and try and focus on the bigger picture, what the underlying question is, etc.
2.3 Topical/controversial
issues in weather and climate.
You could point them to a topic or article (e.g., on www.realclimate.org or Meteosat image of the day) beforehand and then have a
general discussion about it and the surrounding issues. Some tutors have found
that controversial topics, possibly with you playing Devil’s advocate, can be a
way to lure/bait students into participation!
Compare forecasts with data collected. Were observations within forecast uncertainty, did the point observations support the synoptic picture, etc.? Which weather issues/features are most important/interesting and might form a good focal point for the assessed report?
In week 10 (or the 2nd term), it can be useful to try and gain some insight into how the students regard the MSc course, what is/isn’t working, which aspects they did/didn’t enjoy, what they’d like more/less of, is the general pace about right, etc. Students do fill in feedback forms for each module, but this is a chance to get a more holistic view. And after spending so many hours chatting with you, they may be more inclined to open up and tell you what they really think!
3.1 Back-of-the-envelope calculations
Many students are not comfortable with making order-of-magnitude
estimates. Work through a few examples in order to convince them of the utility
of such an approach. Some ideas include deriving then using the hydrostatic
equation to estimate the mass of the atmosphere above a square metre of ground;
the mean surface temperature of the earth be if there
were no atmosphere (given a mean surface albedo of
0.13), etc. An alternative approach is take a range of orders of magnitude
(e.g., 10-10 to 1020) and challenge students to find a
physical parameter to match each. You could begin by encouraging them to
estimate the kinetic energy in a typical cyclone, etc.
3.2 Lapse rate
Ask the students how the
temperature varies through the troposphere. Why? How does this affect the
calculation of scale height? What assumptions need to be made to calculate the
lapse rate? Under what circumstances are these good/bad assumptions? Wallace
& Hobbs (and, of course, Ambaum) have nice summaries of these issues.
3.3 Water vapour and humidity.
Many students struggle with
issues connected with water vapour in the atmosphere. It can sometimes be best
to start from basics, e.g., with a discussion of the mixing ratio and its
relation to humidity, the concept of saturation/equilibrium vapour pressure,
what would happen to a rising parcel of air etc. If students are happy with
these qualitative ideas, then order-of-magnitude calculations can help to build
in some more quantitative aspects, e.g., How much
water is there in this room?
3.4
Planetary rotation
What are the consequences of a rotating,
spherical frame of reference? How do the centripetal and Coriolis
forces come about, over what physical scales are they important? How are they
different from real forces (gravity, the pressure gradient)? And do these
forces combine to form the geostrophic wind?
This is particularly useful for the Atmospheric Physics module towards the end of the autumn term.
Surface pressure maps, satellite imagery, current radar observations, tephigram analysis, etc., and how they relate to what we can observe from the office window.
3.7 Module choices for Spring term
Talk through the various options open to them on their respective
programmes. One thing they really
appreciate is if you co-opt a recent graduate of the MSc programme (there are
usually a few amongst the new PhD intake) to give them an honest opinion of the
various modules.
Many students need reminding about basic strategy such as timing, answering easy questions first, using bullets to get out the main points rather than using perfect prose etc. One approach is to give them half an exam question to do beforehand and then go over how it would be marked, and show them what a marking scheme looks like. A prompt to get students to check their answers are dimensionally and/or order-of-magnitude correct never harms!
4.2 Report/dissertation writing
Around weeks 5-6, students may have specific issues
they want to discuss about writing their Dorset field trip report. In general,
it is useful to talk about approaches to writing large scientific documents:
How to break the document down into manageable chunks, what’s a good
framework/order for chapters/sections, the kind of language to use, a refresher
on referencing, etc.
4.3 Critical analysis of scientific writing
Depending on what particular aspects of science/writing you hope to discuss,
you may want to choose what you feel is either a particularly good or bad
paper/dissertation/project report. If you choose to use a student’s work, you
should check they’re happy with that (or at least remove any names from it). In
order to minimise the amount of extra on the students, it’s best to limit the
amount they have to read (e.g., a paper from a letters journal, or just the
abstract and figure captions). You may wish to focus on either the writing
style or the underlying science, but either way, encourage them to be critical.
4.4 Write your own abstract
Give students a short journal article (e.g., GRL, ERL) to read,
but remove the title/authors/abstract. Ask them to write their own abstract to
the paper with a 150-word limit, then talk through the
results as a group. This helps them learn to read and understand scientific
papers, but also develops their ability to concisely summarise a larger work.