Course PhD Supervision (supervisors)

The course A132/27 PhD Supervision is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, 2023.

Criteria for participation: Postdocs, assistant professors, clinical associate professors, clinicians at AU HE or AUH that currently undertake supervision or co-supervision of enrolled PhD students or research year students at AU HE.

Aim: The quality of PhD students’ education is largely dependent on the PhD supervisor’s competencies as a supervisor. The aim of the basic course in PhD supervision is to expand the participants’ repertoire of supervision strategies and methods to provide a flexible approach to supervision, strengthen their reflections on practices, roles, and relationships in the supervision process, and share experiences and new knowledge for advancing PhD supervisors’ competencies.

Learning outcomes: 

• Describe and give reasons for own supervision practice.
• Analyse and consider actual dilemmas in supervision.
• Identify and argue for individual choices in managing one’s supervisor role.
• Write a supervisory letter to explicate values and traditions in the researcher community.
• Apply communicative methods and time management tools that underpin progression in the supervision meeting.
• Give constructive text feedback and thus promote the PhD-student’s writing process.
• Describe and give reasons for how talent identification and talent development takes place in the supervisor’s research environment.
• Adapt the rules and regulations of the Graduate School of Health.
• Discuss the asymmetric supervisor-supervisee relation and responsible conduct of research.

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 50 hours.

Content: The course is about supervision in research education, including supervision of PhD students and research-year students. The course aims at developing supervisors’ competencies and flexible approaches in the actual supervision process. Participants will work individually and in learning groups with practical exercises, e.g. about feedback and communication, cases designed particularly for this course (e.g. about the alignment of expectations between PhD student and supervisor), and material and cases from their own context (e.g. actual dilemmas in own PhD supervision). Accordingly, participants should prepare material and feedback on the Brightspace course site (max. 30 hours of preparation) in the period from two weeks before the first in-class course day to the last in-class course day. 

Instructors: Mette Krogh Christensen, Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, Helene Nørrelund and heads of graduate programmes.

Venue: Centre for Educational Development, Aarhus University, Trøjborgvej 82, 8000 Aarhus.

Course dates:

• 30 November 2023 09:00 - 15:30
• 05 December 2023 09:00 - 16:00
• 14 December 2023 09:00 - 15:30