FREE TOOLS: building relationships with research students

I’d like to alert you to a new resource for supervisor development on the Think Ahead web pages. The page was developed from Trust Me!  an ongoing research project led by me and funded by the Leadership Foundation for HE, investigating the behaviours that are important in building trust and creating ‘quality’ doctoral supervision relationships.

Throughout the project students and supervisors alike speak of the need to achieve clarity of purpose, and find good ways of working together, seeking to make the uncertain processes of the PhD more predictable; reducing feelings of insecurity, worry and stress for all involved.

The resources (locate the page here) are designed to help supervisors think, plan, and have the right conversations with their students.

Dr super-vulnerable, PhD

I am getting well stuck in to a new project that looks at the relationship between students and supervisors. The project has its own blog and Twitter that are helping me collect stories of PhD supervision from across the country. Below are links to two pieces of writing on vulnerability on both sides of the relationship, that I have shaped up through the initial interviews and discussion groups:

‘Trust’ as a phenomenon can be understood as “willingness to accept uncertainly and make oneself vulnerable in the face of insecurity” (Hope-Hailey et al., 2012).

willingness to accept uncertainly and make oneself vulnerable

supervisor uncertainty and vulnerability

Through the perceptions of doctoral students and supervisors of what constitutes ‘quality’ in doctoral supervision relationships the project will develop practical tools to support academic relationship building.

So, if you are a doctoral student, or supervisor, please have a browse of the study information sheet available here, and share your supervision experiences on the main blog page. Comments are moderated so that we can ensure anonymity for everyone involved.

trust in student-supervisor relationships…

Announcing TRUST ME! A multi-university research study into doctoral student-supervisor relationships…
This project (@predoctorbility on Twitter) is about the relationship between doctoral students and their supervisors and it asks about the quality of that relationship: what constitutes ‘quality’, what does quality mean for learning, and how do you get a quality relationship, and how would you recognise if and when you have it?