Seminars and tutorials are a standard part of delivering teaching in politics departments. However, the range of methods used in such small groups is wide and varied as are the perceptions of the purpose of small group teaching (SGT). On the basis of interviews with students and lecturers, we highlight important differences between what lecturers hope to achieve and what students expect to learn in these sessions. We aim to provide a better understanding of the cause of common problems in SGT and to explore how teaching staff might address these shortcomings to maximise the success of small group teaching.

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It has long been recognized that many late medieval bishops were heavily involved in secular government. Scholars have tended to characterize these activities in fairly general terms, labelling those who chose to serve the crown as 'administrators', 'bureaucrats' or 'civil servants'. In fact, they are better described as king's judges, for a large part of what bishops did in government was dispensing justice in the king's name. The first part of this article explores the contexts of this judicial activity, showing that bishops were especially active in institutions such as parliament, chancery and the council which offered justice to the king's subjects on a discretionary basis. Discretionary justice was closely informed by the precepts of natural law, which in turn derived authority from the abstract notion of the divine will. The second half of the article suggests that the strong theological underpinning of discretionary justice meant that bishops' involvement in secular government did not stand in opposition to their spiritual vocation or their role as leaders of the church. I argue that the sweeping and rather disparaging contemporary and modern characterizations of 'civil-servant' bishops as self-serving careerists ought to be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of the rationale and motivation of those senior clergymen who involved themselves in secular governance.

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