TTT Workshop, June 5-6, 2025
Many universities have started to develop and offer workshops for their doctoral supervisors in response to the increased intake of doctoral candidates and the increased complexity of doctoral education.
However, for workshop trainers it can feel as if entering an unknown territory. Therefore, workshops are designed for those who are seeking sparring, advice, and support on running these supervision workshops.
Questions that are addressed: How do you design a successful supervision workshop? What are effective exercises? Which themes are “need to” and “nice to” include in a supervisor workshop? How to best address research supervisors who are busy academics and potentially a critical group of participants? Is it possible to learn from other trainers and work together instead of reinventing the wheel alone?
Profile of participants and purpose
Those who are developing doctoral supervisor training at their university, or envision doing so in the future. You can be very new to the field and faced with developing your first workshop, or you can be an experienced trainer looking for ideas on how to further develop your supervisor programs.
The purpose is to provide participants with a rich source of knowledge and practice on how to develop, implement, and run doctoral supervisor workshops. It also offers a unique opportunity for participants to share their experiences and to reflect on best practices in their specific institutional context.
Finally, workshop format facilitates a peer-community to support participants’ continuous development as trainers.
Learning outcomes
- Didactical principles for designing high-quality doctoral supervisor workshops and strategies for implementing workshops in different organizational settings.
- Essential themes to address in supervisor workshops.
- Key supervisory models, theories, and tools about roles and relations in supervision, alignment of expectations communication and dialogues, boundary setting and conflict management, and writing and feedback.
- Relevant exercises, group work, and discussions that are aligned with the workshop content and supervisors’ needs.
- How to meet the target group’s demands, including how to prevent and manage resistance.
- Significant scholarly literature in the field of doctoral education and supervision.
Teaching form and Preparation
The teaching form is highly interactive based on a combination of group work, exercises, plenary discussions, and lectures. It is tailored specifically to participants’ needs as they are invited to share their experiences and goals before and during the workshop. During the workshop, the facilitators will demonstrate 1:1 how they run sessions in their supervisor programs while the participants are invited to observe, discuss, and reflect on the content, form, and relevance to their own context. The facilitators will also present their ‘meta-perspectives’ on the teaching sessions by sharing the principles behind and by substantiating it in scholarly literature.
To ensure an effective workshop tailored to participants’ needs and practices, the workshop is designed as a coherent process with a pre- and post-phase. The design is illustrated to the right.
As illustrated in the figure above, participants are asked to prepare before the workshop: 1) read some literature suggested by the facilitators, 2) describe their own experiences and approaches when holding workshops for supervisors or other scientific staff members, 3) reflect on their own strengths and on challenges which they foresee, and 4) identify their individual development goals (what are their current or coming workshop task).
After the workshop (approx. 1-2 months after), participants are offered an online group coaching session. It allows each participant to get feedback from their peers and the two facilitators on their experiences with implementing elements from the workshop. If the participants are not holding workshops in that period, they can still benefit from the coaching by giving feedback to their peers or by getting coaching on their own general reflections and insights from the workshop.
Who will facilitate the workshop?
The workshop is facilitated by two internationally leading educational developers within the field of Doctoral supervision.
Mirjam Godskesen, PhD is an independent consultant and researcher with affiliation to Aalborg University in Denmark as a Part-time lecturer. She founded her company UNWIND in 2006 that has been running with great success and now employs more than seven part-time doctoral coaches and a full-time consultant. She holds 20+ doctoral supervisor courses yearly in Denmark, throughout Scandinavia, the rest of Europe and at the latest also in African and Asian countries.
Gitte Wichmann-Hansen is Senior researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark and Professor at University of Agder, Norway. She also owns the consultancy “Academic Supervision” that offers professional training of research supervisors. She is an established researcher within the field of supervision with 100+ publications on supervision. Her research focuses on the balancing act between hands-on supervision and student independence. Gitte has 15+ years of experience with running supervisor development programs at European Universities at all levels from Bachelor supervision to PhD supervision.
Other practical information
- There is no workshop fee, but participants will have to fund their own travel and lodging.
- Lunch and coffee will provided on both days of the workshop, and dinner after the first day.
- Course certificate: Participants will receive a certificate after completion of the development program.
- Handouts and materials: Participants will get an extensive participant guide that includes key take homes, observation points, reflection notes, etc. They will also get the full slide deck and IP (Intellectual Property) rights to use the slides in your own workshops (with reference to the facilitators).
- Please address all questions about the workshop to Dr. Toby Erik Wikström of the University of Iceland Graduate School (tew@hi.is)