Figuring out what works and sharing with colleagues
For many supervisors and students, online supervision is a new experience. Under any circumstances, developing new approaches can be challenging.
Try to share questions, ideas and maybe resources with fellow supervisors: doing so could help identify and address problems, save time, and even lead to innovation
- Your College, Department or Faculty may have a discussion forum
- You might collaborate to set up an informal network
- You might join Cambridge's discussion forum
Try to collaborate with your students: talk with them about what you’re trying to do, ask them about their experiences of online supervision: what’s working for them, what do they think could help to iron out difficulties or enrich their learning?
The ‘chat’ function within Teams, Forums within Moodle, or collaborative editing documents could be a way for students to develop their ideas and share them with you and each other. There are plenty of suggestions for ways of getting feedback and ideas from students online. We have included one very basic approach, which can also be illuminating:
A simple feedback tool: Commend and recommend
Basic format: at the start of a teaching session, explain to the students that at the end of the session you will ask them for two brief comments on what they have found helpful and one thing that they think could be changed and why they think this would help. The balance of commendations: recommendations (2:1) encourages constructive feedback.
You can decide whether you want to do this live, during a conference call, or whether you will post the questions and ask students to respond in their own time.
Be ready to collect your students' responses, think about their ideas and then explain at or before the beginning of the next supervision what you've decided to do, and why.
Q1: Please tell me two aspects of today's supervision that you found helpful and briefly explain why.
Q2: Please tell me one aspect of today's supervision that you think could be done differently and briefly explain why you think this would make a positive difference.
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We are continuing to add to and develop these resources - we welcome your feedback, as well as your own ideas and examples of tools and practices that work for you and your students. Please get in touch.
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