SuperVisible Encounters with Great Graduate Supervision:
Dr. Roswita Dressler

Roswita Dressler

My story starts with an image that represents my philosophy of supervision: I envision myself as a flight instructor. The image shows part of an airplane’s extremely complicated control panel, which is a proxy for the complexity in a graduate journey! The student is the one flying the plane and choosing where we are going on this journey. As the supervisor, I’m assuming the co-pilot seat. Sometimes I supervise students whose work directly aligns with my area of studies, but very frequently, I supervise students whose research areas are adjacent to mine, but I am not the expert. In this sense, the student is controlling the journey, but it is my responsibility, as the flight instructor, to make sure that they have clear direction and know how to get there safely. In the image you’ll notice there’s another student watching. I often supervise my students as a group and there is always that opportunity for vicarious learning by watching and hearing the suggestions that I offer their peer. Feedback and guidance are important because as supervisors we don’t always demonstrate our work directly. Students don’t sit down and watch me write an article or do a research project. Instead, they tell me what they want to achieve, and I offer them ongoing help and guidance to get there.

Looking Back and Lessons Learned

If I could go back in time to when I first started as a graduate supervisor, the advice I would give myself is to not make any assumptions that students automatically understand the degree process and the academic tasks required to make progress in their research. It is important that you listen carefully to understand what each graduate student knows and can do and provide mentoring that is responsive to their specific strengths and needs.
Given that I had a good supervisory experience, I recognize now that I took several practices for granted in my early supervision with students. For example, I asked a student to write their results chapter and they wrote 80-pages! Then I realized no one had told them what belongs in a results chapter, and we met to discuss how to synthesize their data. That was one of my first, really sharp lessons: before someone writes their results chapter, get them to present their results to you. I invite my students to present a slide deck to explain the results, because if they can explain it, then as the supervisor I can guide them if they are going astray. The way that my graduate supervision has changed over time is I offer a great deal more scaffolding for all the academic and research tasks involved in each step of the thesis writing journey.

Actions for Effective Supervision

One thing that I developed over time as a supervisor, and I would recommend doing from the beginning, is creating a repository of examples. I set up a D2L shell for my students and this shared online space saves me a lot of work because the students can access resources and examples of past students’ work on their own. All my graduate students are enrolled in the D2L shell, so they use each other’s emails to connect with each other. This shared online environment gives us a space of our own which really helps with organization of resources.

Secondly, I encourage supervisors to familiarize themselves with all the program and institutional policies on graduate education and understand that these may change over time. Whenever I get a new email from the program or FGS, I keep copies to stay on top of any changes.

The third thing I recommend for other supervisor is to develop a method for organizing each students’ information. I have an electronic file for each of my students with meeting notes, copies of all their filled documents, copies of all their drafts and final versions. I find at the beginning when we are discussing their coursework, we may meet 3 months later, and I can’t recall the courses we’d planned. That’s when I pull up the document for review and discussion. It’s fine at the beginning when you have one or two students, but once you have multiple graduate students, you’re going to forget details and timelines unless you have a method for keeping track.

Fourth, I try to set expectations at the beginning and then reinforce them. However, I think trust in those expectations builds over time when students can make progress and meet their goals. I set clear expectations, some of which might be news that they don’t want to hear, and I can be kind of a hard taskmaster. For example, if I give them a critique on an abstract, which they then get accepted by a conference or journal, I hope they see how the critique from me helped to improve the abstract.

Finally, my students come to understand that I will always be honest with them. If I think they are going down a wrong road, or genuinely making a mistake, I will say so. I will let them know, for example, that I expect when they finish writing the dissertation, before I send it to the committee for feedback, that it will be as close to a perfect, beautiful version as possible, because that’s what I expect from other supervisors when I am on a committee. I also tell them I won’t rush their committee, because I don’t want to be rushed. I build trust, and I also explain to them the rationale behind the things I do which some students may find hard to accept, but they come to trust that I have thought this through and it comes from seeing the process unfold in a way that will make them successful.

Knowledge for Effective Supervision

In building a supervisory practice, I believe supervisors need to know and understand that the way they have always done things isn’t the way it’s always going to continue. Students come from other contexts where things may have been done differently. I have students who have PhDs from elsewhere and they might bring certain assumptions with them, but I can’t assume that they know our process. The way we do things at the University of Calgary is just one way among many.

I think part of knowing how to be effective as a supervisor is remembering that we are role models. It is important for us to remember what it is like to be a graduate student and believe you need to work 24-7. It’s up to you as supervisor to set appropriate boundaries and be a role model for wellness. In the School of Education, our faculty members go full steam, all year round. Supervisors need to avoid overworking themselves, and put appropriate boundaries in place, and recognize that their graduate students look to them for guidance. I have found that the student supervisor checklist provides an opportunity for me to emphasize trust-building by discussing expectations and wellness from the beginning of a relationship. I am my students’ Wellness Ambassador, and I let them know, “I’m not just being nosy” and it may be unusual, depending on their background, to tell their supervisor if they’re sick, or need a break, but I would like to know.

Supervisors need to know that we have different students. Some are working full-time and doing their degree off the side of their desks. They take time off as needed; conversations tend to be around the academic standards and timelines. Whereas students who are fully immersed in academia and take advantage of different opportunities, might need to know what academic life involves. There are always projects on the go, and service, research, teaching, and how do we keep track and balance it? When do we make choices about our well-being, and how do we weigh those decisions? For example, when somebody is falling behind on their timelines and there’s a holiday coming up, I will remind students that the university is closed for two weeks, and they have some choices to make. I’m taking time off; my students need to decide whether they need to take time off, or take part of it off, or whether they need to use this holiday time to catch-up. Everybody ultimately needs to make their own individual decisions, but sometimes I am that sounding board, or the one that starts the conversation.

Innovation and Reflection

What is innovative about my supervision practice? Good question! A practice that is something new-ish for me is group meetings with my students. I decided a few years ago to meet with all my students for an hour once a week and I love it. I use the meetings for the mock exams, going over PowerPoints as people prepare for their exams, talking about events, upcoming scholarships, or preparing conference abstracts. Sometimes there’s no agenda and we review timelines as a group. This is the start of my third year using group meetings, and I noticed that my graduate students love this approach, too. The attendance is almost perfect. They almost never miss, and my students often let me know if they’re going to be absent. My students have indicated that they don’t want to miss out because they learn something valuable every time.

A lot of my development as a supervisor comes from running into a roadblock. When something is not working, I seek advice from colleagues. I don’t tend to sit down and systematically look for innovative practices, but I do ask other people about what they do. I like checklists and do a weekly reflection of what’s been done and what’s coming up. I also do an annual reflection to determine what I want to do differently this year. In those ways, I am always growing and changing as a supervisor.

Learn More about:

Dr. Roswita Dressler, Professor, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary [profile]

Recipient, 2023 Distinguished Graduate Supervision Award, Werklund School of Education