Five characteristics of effective supervisor training

On 28 February 2023, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) launched its report on holistic doctoral supervision. The report provides an outline of practices that enable “productive supervision”, with numerous examples from member institutions.

The document calls for mandatory supervision training. This is an issue we have researched extensively in South Africa. While our context varies considerably from that of LERU, we believe that some of our findings will be of wider interest to any institution intending to introduce such training.

1. Supervision training must be offered by credible experts

Universities increasingly have units tasked with providing staff training. There is also an entire industry of higher education consultants for hire. Our research suggests that neither of these groups make suitable supervision training facilitators. Those courses that were offered by established researchers with significant supervision experience were far more likely to be evaluated by participants as having offered meaningful engagement. This is important because, as the LERU report notes, training needs to “provide tangible benefit” and participants need to perceive it as an “effective and efficient use of their time”.

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2. Supervision training must take context seriously into account

There was resistance to supervisor training that worked off a premise of generic best practice. Supervision of a funded team in a chemistry laboratory requires a very different approach from the supervision of a self-funded English literature candidate studying part-time. Participants became disengaged if the training failed to acknowledge such differences.

3. Supervision training cannot be a one-off endeavour

While the LERU document calls for “short, modular” training opportunities, it also points out that development opportunities need to be available over a range of formats and across time. Our research suggests that it is much easier for universities to offer one-off workshops than to ensure ongoing informal opportunities for supervisors to obtain the support they might need, when they need it. Thus, targeted efforts to provide ongoing support are needed.

4. Supervision training must go together with enhancing institutional research environments and processes

If a university offers a supervision training course, it should not be under the misapprehension that it has done all that is needed to enhance doctoral education. As the LERU report points out, a full range of research-oriented services can support supervisors and doctoral candidates. It might be that LERU’s member institutions, by virtue of being research universities, already have multiple opportunities for supervisors and doctoral candidates to share their research and to learn from each other. But this was certainly not the case for our participants, many of whom work in institutions where the offering of doctorates is a new phenomenon and where research seminars and the like are rarely available. Such universities might mistakenly believe that, if only the supervisor was properly trained, doctoral retention and completion would be addressed. Our research suggests that the structure and culture of the institutional environment in offering opportunities for broadening research knowledge and personal development is every bit as important in the doctoral candidate’s experience as the quality of the supervision they receive.

5. Supervision training needs to be about development of practices and not compliance with processes

If the supervision training is understood as a set of generic skills to be transmitted to a course participant, it is doomed to failure. Our research indicates that where supervisor development opportunities were crafted as spaces of collegiality and connection in which to discuss the complexities of doctoral education with experienced doctoral supervisors, they were far more likely to be evaluated as offering a meaningful engagement.

Mandatory or voluntary?

The LERU report argues for mandatory supervisor training. Our participants had mixed views on this issue. Many did argue that training needed to be mandatory because well-regarded researchers did not always make the best supervisors, yet they were the least likely to attend training voluntarily. The LERU report suggests that there could be a case for some “talented researchers without sufficient people skills” being permitted to pursue their research goals without being compelled to supervise.

On the other hand, some participants suggested that making training mandatory could position it as required by management and thus less likely to be seen as a space for genuine engagement and personal development. If the training is perceived to be another compliance requirement in a managerialist environment, this could result in what we described as “passive attendance”. It also means that the facilitators of such courses need to expend a great deal more energy in ensuring that participants understand the space to be educational, collegial and developmental rather than managerial and focused on monitoring and compliance.

Doctoral education is increasingly complex, and supervisors need developmental support. But training courses will prove effective only if they are appropriately designed and implemented.

This advice draws on the following research by Puleng Motshoane and Sioux McKenna:

Crossing the border from candidate to supervisor: the need for appropriate development

“More than agency: the multiple mechanisms affecting postgraduate education” Pushing boundaries in postgraduate supervision

The mechanisms conditioning doctoral supervision development in public universities across South Africa

Sioux McKenna is director of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University; Puleng Motshoane is an academic developer and senior manager in the Centre for Academic Technologies at the University of Johannesburg. 

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South African universities need to better support doctoral supervisors