Strenghtening Supervision Competencies

 

 

Strengthening supervisory competencies

Practise, reflect, adjust

Building supervisors’ competences is a long-term personal process. As with any competence development it requires a combination of building theoretical understanding and knowledge, and acquiring practical skills and internalizing them. It is an iterative learning process of trying new things out, getting feedback, reflecting on feedback and practice, and making changes.

 

Ask for feedback

Supervision takes place in a ‘closed room’, it is usually a private business and feedback on your practice is scarce. Giving feedback on supervision is not very common, so the supervisor will have to ask for it.

 

Ongoing evaluation

You can ask your PhD student to evaluate your supervision, e.g. by making it routine to end each meeting with a short evaluation of the meeting (mutual evaluation). You can also use the half-yearly assessments as an opportunity to discuss your supervisory style and make adjustments.

 

You can ask co-supervisors to give you feedback after supervision meetings where some or all supervisors participated.

Some supervision courses train peer supervision or peer feedback, e.g. the courses provided by Education Research, Science Faculty, see courses below.

 

Courses

Supervision courses can inspire you in this process. Below we provide some links to courses.

 

• Education Research, Science Faculty, University of Copenhagen: Supervision course
• Central Administration, University of Copenhagen (Danish) course catalogue