How would you deal with these scenarios within the context of your supervision?
Scenario One
One of the things that you value most in an essay is a logical argument presented in a clear and concise structure. Your students, despite constant reminders from you, are not succeeding in producing this type of essay. What could you do in your supervision to encourage students to organise their ideas and arguments whilst ensuring that you are still covering the course content that you are required to cover?
Scenario Two
You are becoming increasingly frustrated by the grammar mistakes that are occurring in your students’ essays. You have tried highlighting all mistakes on your students’ papers but this is proving too time-consuming and taking your attention away from the more important content material. What could you do to improve the situation?
Scenario Three
One of your students has tried to respond to the feedback you have offered on selecting more appropriate secondary reading and quoting effectively to support his argument. However, his latest essay still includes unnecessarily lengthy quotations from primary texts and you still have the impression that he is hanging his argument around the secondary material, rather than using it to support his own. What could you do to help this student finally improve his essays in this respect?
Now click here to access feedback on these scenarios from participants on the workshop.
Exemplar essay
Read this supervision essay (pdf) and note the feedback that you would offer the student.
Now click here to access comments from supervisors who attended the workshop.