5.4 The Supervisor's Eyes and Ears

Managing group processes can absorb a lot of supervisor time

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This bundle reduces the amount of supervisor time spent in managing group processes by using postgraduate students in an intermediate supervisory role.

The way it works is that each project group is allocated a postgraduate "advisor". These advisors give no technical input, but focus on group processes and the early identification of problems. Advisors are specifically told that their responsibility is to spot problems rather than fix them. The advisors are paid, so they turn up to meetings and send in reports much more reliably than academic staff.

Students meet with their advisor on a weekly basis; the agenda and minutes are included in the student's project log, which is an assessed deliverable (assessment of this is undertaken jointly between advisor and supervisor). An additional assessment benefit is that the advisor can provide independent evidence to moderate or justify extreme mark distributions within the group.

Each advisor sends the supervising member of staff a weekly report of their group's progress (which can provide early identification and evidence of non-performance so defaulters can be chased) making the advisor the supervisor's "eyes and ears" on the group.

When problems are identified, the supervisor talks it over with the advisor and agrees on the next step. This may take the form of ideas that the advisor can feed to the group, or it may involve the supervisor talking to some or all the group members. In extremis, the supervisor may sit in on a progress meeting or formally summon the group to a meeting with them.

It works better if the project is of sufficient length and complexity to require investment in process. It is most useful were the students have not worked together before and the groups are mixed or lacking in terms of group-working experience: ideal for second years.

It doesn't work if advisors act as project manager and therefore remove the need for the group to own their process. It doesn't work if they start to give technical advice - which is perceived as unfair by some students. It doesn't work if there are insufficient postgraduates available - in any case new advisors need to be recruited and briefed each year. There can be "advisor" problems with postgraduates who are not experienced enough to spot a group which blows up late in the project.

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So: see who else might be able to supervise the non-technical aspects of group projects.