Discussion on research supervision

In my department we have bi-monthly research meetings, where we report back on our research activities (we get dedicated research time and so need to account for how we’ve used that time). We’ve recently changed the format of the meeting to include a topical discussion or presentation, rather than simply reporting progress back to the group.

Today was our first session in this new format and we discussed some of the issues around supervision. Everyone in the department is responsible for supervising either a group of 4th year physiotherapy students as they go through the process of conducting a research project, or a group of postgraduate students who are working on their degrees. Here are some notes I took during the session.

Contracts are useful, not only between the supervisor and student, but between the students themselves (in cases of group research). We often find that some students don’t participate or contribute to the process as much as the rest of the group, which has the potential to cause conflict, especially when marks are involved. While conflict does give the opportunity to work through conflict management processes with the group (not desirable, but still a learning opportunity), a contract that outlines responsibilities, roles, expectations, accountability and consequences, may go some way to reducing it’s likelihood.

The issue of supervision style was raised, and it was pointed out that often supervisors will have a different way of approaching supervision. In addition, students have different ways that they want to be supervised. It seems that managing expectations in terms of communicating personal preferences is important to begin with, and probably to keep reviewing during the process.

As a research supervisor, it’s important to have prepared a plan for moving the project forward. At PhD level, it’s largely the responsibility of the student to manage this, but undergraduate and Masters students (generally) aren’t ready to completely manage their own projects. One useful project management tool that was suggested was to use Gantt charts to plan the project over time.

Finally, we need to go over what “academic writing” actually means. Students are often under the impression that it’s about using big words and complicated sentence structure, when all we’re really looking for is argument construction and defense. Academic writing is about conveying ideas in simple language, something our students don’t always understand.

I enjoyed the session, and although it lacked structure, it gave us the opportunity to discuss the issues faced during the supervision process. It’s always nice to be able to draw on the experience of professors and seasoned researchers, and I’m looking forward to our next sessions. I’ll be presenting a session on systematic reviews with a colleague in 2 weeks time, and will be putting that up here too.

Edit: I just had a colleague point out that we also discussed the role of feedback in supervision. I haven’t included those details in this post, because I have a more comprehensive post dealing with feedback that I’m working on at the moment, which can be found here.