Community Acuity (37): Nurturing Excellence through Communication, Participation, and Empathy

This is a guest post by Dr Lesley McLean, Lecturer in Human Resource Management, Edinburgh Napier University. The journey towards gaining a doctoral degree can be laborious, enlightening, frustrating, revelatory, tearful and joyful. It must also be transformative! Not just for the student putting in the hard yards, but also for the supervisors, reviewers and …

Developing a solution-focused graduate supervision approach

This is a guest post by Dr Yukari Seko, Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication and Asmaa Malik, Associate Professor in the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. This post is based on their 2023 paper Towards solution-focused graduate supervision: Developing a research-based live simulation for graduate supervisors. “I wish my supervisor …

The doctoral supervisor as methodological mentor: postgraduate methodological journeys

Dr Timothy Clark (@DrTimothyClark) is a Senior Lecturer, Supervisor and Researcher in Education and Childhood at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). The selection, and coherent application, of methodological approach is often highlighted as one of the most challenging aspects of doctoral study. In my own experience, as an EdD student, the …

Thesis Supervision: the educational value of postdocs in supporting research writing

By Dr Kay Guccione I delivered this presentation at the UCL Institute of Education Event on the 9th June: 'Doctoral education and its purposes: research training for a changing world' It focuses on how doctoral writers are supported to make progress, using outcome data from a thesis mentoring programme to understand the educational value postdocs …

Building mentoring into the culture of researcher development

By Dr Kay Guccione I recently joined Kelly Preece, Researcher Development Manager at Exeter, on her PGR development podcast 'R, D and the In-betweens'. I really enjoyed myself chatting away to her about mentoring programmes for researchers, and the origins of my 'programme level' contribution to this book about mentoring in academic workplaces. My episode …

New book! Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development

By Dr Kay Guccione My friend, colleague and co-author, Dr Steve Hutchinson and I have a new book just out: Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development, published by Emerald in their Surviving and Thriving in Academia series. If you order here, from the Emerald bookstore, and use the code 'THRIVING' you'll get 30% off, making …

Resources for Thesis Mentors

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash The uncertainly about how to continue with PhD study, and how to manage the transition to new working circumstances caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, has left early career colleagues feeling vulnerable, and therefore open to predatory approaches. I was prompted to write this post because I saw that a former thesis mentee …

coaching PhD researchers supports their sense of progress, and reduces intention to quit.

This blog post is written by two Danish researchers and academic developers, Mirjam Godskesen, affiliated with Aalborg University, and Sofie Kobayashi, affiliated with the University of Copenhagen. Both work as private consultants, coaches, and teachers and researchers in higher education. Based on a project on coaching PhD students at Danish universities, they studied the effects …

postdocs can’t supervise!

Institutional and sector pressures on the doctorate, on doctoral supervision, and on academic practice, have increased in recent years, and supervision is just one element of academic practice in an increasingly high demand ‘all-rounder’ academic role. Supervision, and the supervisory relationship, is often described as the most important determinant of doctoral success (linked to success, happiness, and mental health) …

PGR Peer-Mentoring can’t compensate for poor supervision

Making sense of PhD learning experiences, and understanding the ’norms’ of research can be enabled by supportive peer cohorts and communities, good supervision relationships and recent research has mapped a wider set of ‘meaningful others’ interplaying across doctoral support networks. Peer-to-peer mentoring models in many different contexts can provide good longitudinal support for engaged individuals and so peer-mentoring …