The aim of this course is to expand and consolidate supervision strategies and methods for supervisors of Bachelor's, Master's-, and PhD students at the Aarhus BSS Graduate School.

The course also aims at furthering the sharing of experiences among university supervisors within their faculty to enhance the co-development of local practices and collegial support.

Learning outcomes

After the course, the participants will be able to:

• describe their own approach to supervision as part of aligning expectations with the students in accordance with current regulations and the outcomes of their project
• identify and deal with typical challenges in supervision, such as balancing between the support and the control function, between the product and the process dimension, and between the private and the professional domain, in a supervision relationship
• clarify genre requirements for disciplinary scholarly writing
• provide appropriate feedback to promote students’ writing processes
• employ communicative techniques to enhance supervision outcomes and promote student independence
• receive and give collegial feedback as part of developing own and others' supervisory skills
• utilize their professional community as a resource in their supervision practice

Course content

The course builds on the participants’ existing experiences as well as current research. It aims at strengthening participants’ supervisory skills within following areas:

1. Content, text-based competencies
   These involve clarifying academic requirements to written products, supporting writing processes by providing prioritized, constructive, specific, concrete and criteria-based feedback.
2. Relational and process-oriented competencies
   These involve establishing trusting relationships and negotiating and revisiting expectations
3. Communicative competencies
   These involve conversational techniques that stimulate students’ independent thinking; listening skills and the ability to meta-communicate on the why and how of the chosen approach to supervision.
4. Community building competencies
   These involve the co-development of local practices and collegial support through sharing experiences with supervision and engaging in reflexive conversations on issues related to supervision.