A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Supervising research students
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• the ability to recruit and select good candidates and establish effective
working relationships with them and, where appropriate, with cosupervisors;
• the ability to offer appropriate support to students’ research projects,
including encouraging and supporting them to write up their work, giving
useful and prompt feedback on submitted work, advising on keeping the
project on track, and monitoring progress;
• a concern to support the personal, professional and career development of
doctoral students;
• an ability to support students through the processes of completion of their
thesis and final examination;
• an ability to critically evaluate their practice as supervisors and, where
appropriate, disseminate it.
Awards
Three awards, each to the value of £1,000, will be available to successful staff to
support their academic development in the field of doctoral supervision.
Procedure
For details go to: http://www.dur.ac.uk/academicstaffdevelopment/vcsawards/.
The statements of successful candidates will be published in the newsletter
Quality Enhancement in Durham, and on the university’s website as examples of
good practice in doctoral supervision.
(Dr Stan Taylor, Academic Staff Development Officer, University of Durham)
SUSTAINING THE RELATIONSHIP
Integrating skills training into research degree programmes
There is now a requirement that doctoral students receive a coherent skills set as part of
their training. The background to this is reviewed in Case study 2. All research students
funded by the UK Research Councils (2001) and some other funding bodies must receive
training which covers the research skills and techniques that are appropriate to their areas
of research (A to C in the list below) and a wider set of employment-related skills or highlevel
transferable skills (D to G). This common skills set is known as the Joint Skills
Statement (JSS) and is organised under the following headings:
[A]
[B]
Research skills and techniques;
Research environment;