Have decided to share with you some more information about how the courses I'm taking are taught, more precisely about what kind of assignments we have to complete.

To complete each module students are required to submit 1 or 2 assignments depending on the course's number of credits hours. Both core modules I'm taking require to write 2 papers 3.000 words each broadly devoted to the topics covered in them. To give you a more specific example, I'll share with you some information about one of the assignments I'm working on right now.

It's an essay which should be devoted to teaching of Reading/Writing. The assignment asks you to consider some problem or issue you have faced in your teaching context. First, you need to choose between Reading and Writing, then decide what problem you are going to analyse. After that off you go to the specifics of the chosen problem and its analysis in research literature for the purposes of finding some way of addressing the issue you have chosen.

Choosing between reading and writing was easy:). However, the next step of deciding on the focus of my work turned out to be rather difficult because what I wanted to do is to analyse different forms of feedback on students' writing and make a conclusion about how well they work and what can be done to improve them. It sounded quite manageable to me until I went into detail of what I wanted to write about. Not only did I want to analyse teacher and peer feedback but also to consider what changes in them and how when they are web- or internet based. Having spent several days reading on the subject, I've accumulated quite a considerable number of resources. Meaning that I'm going too broad. My usual problem, though. What I don't like about it is the struggle I am having, but, on the other hand, this is a good teaching/learning moment... I can feel in the shoes of my students and understand better what kind of problems they might have when completing the writing assignments.

I find the assignments we have to complete a good preparation to writing the critical study (this is what they call the MA dissertations at Leeds University) because you have to go through the same process you will have to go through when writing the critical study only this time on a smaller scale.

I mentioned before that the study environment at Leeds is very supportive and you receive a lot of help from your teachers. You can make an appointment with the professor teaching a section of the module you are writing the assignment on  to seek advice on something you have a problem with (in my case it was narrowing down the topic). Do not want to do it F2F? Then discuss it via email.

Want to finish on a funny note...

Somebody asked how many references the work should contain, and one of our professors said that 30 will be suspicious, 1 disappointing and added that the issue is not how much you have read but how you have used it... So how many is a good number? He said, '10. I'll be very impressed.'