PGR Supervisors in BBSRC DTP Training

Do you want to be part of a university-wide community of research leaders, who are daring enough to want to have conversations about their research leadership journey? 

Do you want to become a research leader committed to designing supportive research environments and a thriving research culture? 

This course kick-starts the development of such a community and facilitates your development as a research leader engaged in fostering a positive research culture.

Participants will commit to three half-day in-person workshops and two virtual Masterminds (2h in groups of four).

Each workshop will create a space to explore topics related to your developing role as a research leader with expanding responsibilities and complexities. Examples of questions addressed in the sessions: 

• What do I want my research group culture to be like? 
• What kind of research leader am I am aiming to become? 
• What do I need to know about myself to shift my leadership potential to the next stage? 
• What are really the rules of the game in academic progression? 
• How can we have better conversations in research environments? 

The first workshop will be held on Wednesday, 28 February 2024 from 9.30am – 1pm. Further details and booking information can be found on the training catalogue.

We all wish our postgraduate researchers to be innovative and successful, but how can we empower and enable our PGRs?

This workshop will consider practical strategies to unlock creativity, ideas and innovation, leading to great collaborations and research, as well as thriving team members.  We’ll cover: 

• Enabling diverse contributions and thinking 
• Recognising assumptions and inviting constructive challenge  
• Structured events and meeting formats to nurture creativity and exploration  

The workshop will be held on Tuesday, 27 February 2024, 10.30am – 12.30pm (noon). Further details and booking information can be found on the training catalogue.

A doctorate is a journey towards academic independence. Doctoral researchers start and finish at different points, gaining different skills along the way; doctoral supervisors place different emphases on different points of the journey and have different interpretations of what supervision means.    There are no absolute ‘rights’ and few absolute ‘wrongs’ in supervision, and as such it is essential for the supervisory relationship to be framed by clear boundaries and rooted in mutually explicit expectations about what is required and offered by all parties.  In this focused, interactive, session we’ll examine how to discuss expectations and clarify boundaries.  Specifically, we’ll consider:  

• where supervision starts and stops – what the role actually involves;
• researcher expectations and the corresponding realities;
• how to discuss and clarify expectations and ‘contract’ who has responsibility for what;
• the roles and responsibilities of the co-supervisor, supervisory team, advisor and other support elements;

The session will be held on Thursday, 29 February 2024 from 1pm – 3pm. Further details and booking information can be found on the training catalogue.

Doctoral researchers, like all professionals – especially those in formative stages – require a mixture of challenge and support in order to develop.  Correspondingly, much of the value that a doctoral supervisor can offer is through quality and constructively critical feedback.  However, tonally, academia often overlooks the ‘constructive’ element of feedback and focuses purely on the ‘criticism’.  This may make for ‘correct’ technique, but does little to help with the mental health of imposter syndrome-prone researchers.  In this session we’ll examine good practice in the skill of giving feedback that both supports and challenges. Specifically, we’ll consider:  

• understanding what feedback is needed;
• striking the balance between support and challenge;
• understanding culture and expectations and so tailoring feedback to individuals;

The session will be held on Friday, 8 March 2024 from 10am – 12pm (noon). Further details and booking information can be found on the training catalogue.

Enhance your role as a PhD supervisor with our focused half-day workshop, designed to strengthen supervisor-student relationships through an EDI lens. In this session, you will:  

• identify key behavioural skills essential for nurturing and developing successful PhD students;
• learn practical ways to apply these skills to build stronger, more effective relationships with your students;
• understand the varied PGR experiences and interactions using insights from DTP supervisors and PS professionals;
• recognise and address potential obstacles that may hinder some PGRs while helping others.

Outcome: Equip yourself with the knowledge to create an inclusive and empowering research environment, enabling diverse researchers to flourish at all stages of their academic journey. Join us to transform your supervisory approach and positively impact the careers of your PhD students.  

The sessions will be held on Wednesday, 13 March 2024 from 9.30am - 1pm or from 1.30pm - 5pm. Further details and booking information can be found on the training catalogue.

This session will focus on how to build a long-term culture of psychological safety within your research team. Creativity goes hand in hand with failure. And trying something new can often mean mistakes. We will look at the actions which you can take to build students’ confidence in trying out new ideas, whilst being clear on the non-negotiables, such as health and safety or rigorous research protocols and good data management. We’ll look at: 

• practical tools for agreeing expectations and ‘how we work together’;
• building confidence and overcoming barriers to creativity;
• failure and mistakes as a crucial part of the learning process; 
• checking in: recognising and addressing it if things aren’t working well; 

The session will be held on Thursday, 21 March 2024 from 1pm – 3pm. Further details and booking information can be found on the training catalogue.