Working With Your Supervisor
Two truncated lists and one worked pair of questions. The pair is the part worth carrying: it turns an open-ended request for evaluation into a decision your supervisor can make in a sentence - and the slide that teaches it labels the wrong one.
Where this material sits, and what it answers to
The supervision content arrives late in the week's slide deck on writing up, after the report structures and the abstract material. It is short - a handful of slides - and it is the most practically usable material in the fourteen weeks after the proposal content itself.
One structural observation is worth making before any of it is used. The week states three learning objectives: deciding the process for writing your research proposal, explaining what is involved in writing a research paper, and assessing how to write an abstract. None of them mentions supervision. This material answers to no stated objective, which means it is neither promised nor assessed - and it is among the best content in the subject.
Roles and expectations, as far as the file preserves them
What you may expect - recoverable items
- Regular scheduled meetings
- Assistance in refining the topic and guidance about the process
- (the list continues beyond the extractable text)
What your supervisor should do - recoverable items
- Direct your work so that it is executed in a competent, scholarly manner
- Guide you in the right direction
- (the list continues beyond the extractable text)
Even truncated, the two sides are asymmetric in a way worth noticing. Your expectations are about access and process - meetings happening, the topic being refined, being told how the thing works. Their responsibilities are about standard and direction - that the work is scholarly, and that it points the right way. Neither list mentions the other's obligations, which is why the opening instruction to agree expectations explicitly is doing real work.
Preparing for a meeting
The preparation instruction is specific and short, and it is worth taking literally. You are told to arrive with issues to discuss, questions to ask, and a plan of further progression; to be specific about what information you want; and that the better the questions you ask, the better the feedback you get.
The three things the material tells you to bring
Issues to discuss
The things that have come up since the last meeting and that you cannot settle alone. Naming them as issues rather than as general anxiety makes them addressable in the time available.
Questions to ask
Written down, and specific about what information you want. This is where the worked pair below applies: the question you write determines the answer you can get.
A plan of further progression
What you intend to do next, so the meeting is a review of a proposed course rather than a request for one. It also gives your supervisor something concrete to disagree with, which is more useful than assent to a blank page.
That third item deserves emphasis for a project manager, because it inverts the usual instinct of a supervised person. You are not there to be told what to do next. You arrive with what you intend to do next, and the meeting decides whether it holds. The proposal itself is framed the same way elsewhere in the material - an initial document that is explicitly not binding, and that serves as a starting point for discussions to firm up the topic, methodology and mechanics of the research. See What a Research Proposal Must Answer.
The worked question pair
One slide gives a worked comparison of two questions. It is the only place in fourteen weeks where the material demonstrates how to ask for something rather than telling you to.
WHY THE NARROW QUESTION OUTPERFORMS THE BROAD ONE
| "Do you think the discussion of X fits better in section A or B?" | "Would you look at my writing?" | |
|---|---|---|
| What it asks for | A decision between two identified options | An unbounded act of evaluation |
| Work already done by you | The problem is located, the options are named, the analysis is finished | None visible |
| What an answer costs the reader | One sentence, and no preparation | A full reading, with no stated criterion for judging |
| What you can do with the answer | Act on it immediately | Depends entirely on what came back |
| What silence means | A decision not yet made | Anything at all |
The comparison is this library's analysis. The source supplies the two questions and its one-line preference, and no reasoning.
The mechanism is worth stating plainly, because it transfers directly to any request made of a senior person. A narrow question moves the work of framing from the reader to you, and leaves the reader only the judgement you actually need. It also proves, in its own wording, that you have done the analysis - you cannot pose a genuine A-or-B question without having identified the material, the two candidate homes and the reason it might belong in either.
The broad question does the opposite. It hands over the framing, the criteria and the scope all at once, and it is answerable at any depth from a shrug to a rewrite. Both parties then discover what was wanted only after the effort has been spent.
The label on the wrong question
Two consequences follow for a reader using this material. First, take the worked pair and ignore the parenthesis - the two example questions carry the whole lesson without any classification attached to them. Second, do not carry the slide's terminology into any other part of your work. The subject discusses question types in its data-collection material, in a different context and for a different purpose, at Structured and Unstructured Questions.
Turning a broad ask into a narrow one
The source gives one worked pair and no method for producing more. The transformations below are this library's constructions, offered as illustrations of the same move; they are not source examples and none of them is a template to submit as written.
ILLUSTRATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS - THIS LIBRARY'S, NOT THE SOURCE'S
| What you want to ask | What to ask instead | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| "Would you look at my writing?" | "Does the discussion of X fit better in section A or B?" | The source's own pair - a decision replaces an evaluation |
| "Is my methodology all right?" | "My design gives me one site and one point in time. Does that stop me claiming Y, or only narrow it?" | Names the design feature and the specific claim at risk |
| "Have I read enough?" | "I have treated these three strands as the main divisions of the field. Is there a fourth I should not be leaving out?" | Exposes your map of the field so it can be corrected |
| "What do you think of my results chapter?" | "Have I put interpretation in the results chapter that belongs in the discussion?" | Supplies the criterion the reader should apply |
| "Am I on track?" | "On this plan, analysis starts in week 14. If ethics approval slips a month, do I cut the second case or the pilot?" | Converts reassurance-seeking into a decision with named options |
The instructions that repeat
The subject's closing checklist returns to supervision four times, paraphrased here rather than reproduced: see your supervisor regularly and take their advice seriously; do not ignore that advice or let the meetings lapse; start writing drafts of your report early and show them; and do not adopt an unconventional style of analysis or writing without consulting them first.
The first two are the same instruction stated twice, once as a Do and once as a Don't - a pattern that runs through that whole list and is examined at The Do's and Don'ts of Social Research. The third connects supervision to the recording discipline examined at Overcoming Writer's Block: a supervisor cannot review a draft that was never written, and the case study in that week turns on exactly that.
Before the meeting
- Written issues, written questions, and a stated plan for what you intend to do next
- Each question narrow enough to be answered in a sentence, or deliberately broad and explicitly bounded
- Anything you want read sent far enough ahead to be read, with its length stated
- The decisions you took since the last meeting, and why - so advice is given against the current position
- One question you are afraid to ask, asked
- A note taken during the meeting of what was a direction and what was a suggestion
What to do with the answers once they arrive, and the other people who can read your work before your supervisor does, is treated at Seeking and Using Feedback.
What to carry forward
- Agree roles and expectations at the start. The material's first instruction is the one that prevents most of what follows.
- Both source lists are truncated in the supplied file. Only their opening items exist here, and nothing has been added to complete them.
- "Regular" is never quantified, and the material never says who arranges the meetings or what happens when they stop.
- Bring three things: issues to discuss, questions to ask, and a plan of further progression - the plan being yours, not theirs.
- A narrow question outperforms a broad one because it moves the framing work to you and leaves only the judgement you need.
- The slide labels the open question as closed. Use the pair, discard the label, and do not carry the terminology anywhere else.
- A broad request is legitimate when the whole shape is in question - bound it with a purpose, a criterion and a length.
- Record which meeting outputs were directions and which were suggestions. The distinction is what the breakdown scenario turns on.
Frequently asked questions
How often should supervision meetings happen?
The material says "regular scheduled meetings" and never quantifies it - no interval, no minimum, no length. Any figure you see attached to this material has been imported from elsewhere. Agree a cadence explicitly at the start, since the material's own advice is that both parties be clear about expectations.
Whose job is it to arrange the meetings?
The material does not say. Its breakdown scenario notes in passing that meetings were "usually at times arranged by the supervisor", and that arrangement is part of how that failure develops - when the supervisor stops calling meetings, nothing else causes one to happen. Settling who initiates is worth doing on the first day.
Is the slide right that "Would you look at my writing?" is a closed question?
No. It is the open one, and the question the slide prefers - section A or section B - is the closed one. The terminology is inverted while the advice is correct. This library records the error rather than correcting it silently, because the slide is what a reader will be working from.
What if my supervisor prefers to read whole drafts rather than answer narrow questions?
Then send whole drafts and put the narrow questions in a covering note. The two are not in conflict: the point of a specific question is that it tells the reader what judgement you need, which makes a full reading more useful rather than less.
Should I send work before the meeting or bring it with me?
The material does not address this. As a practical matter, anything you want read has to arrive with enough time to be read, and stating its length helps the reader allocate that time. Work brought into the room can be discussed but not reviewed.
Does any of this apply to a sponsor rather than an academic supervisor?
The question discipline transfers almost unchanged. A narrow question with named options gets a decision from a senior stakeholder; an open request for a view gets a view. What does not transfer is the responsibility framing - a supervisor is accountable for the scholarly standard of your work in a way a project sponsor is not.
References and source attribution
- The supplied teaching source: weekly study notes, slide decks and assessment activities for a master's-level research methods subject in project management. Author, institution and year are not stated in the supplied files.
- The Week 13 slide deck on the challenge of writing up, slides 23 to 25, which carry the expectations list, the responsibilities list and the meeting-preparation guidance including the worked question pair. Slides 23 and 24 are truncated in the file's extractable text.
- The responsibilities list on slide 24 is attributed by the slide itself to an institutional responsibilities page, which is not supplied and is not named here.
- The closing checklist of the same subject, reproduced by its final week from a methods text's student-researcher toolkit with a copyright line dated 2012, whose four supervision items are paraphrased rather than reproduced above.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- Rewrite these five questions for my next supervision meeting so each can be answered in one sentence.
- Draft an expectations agreement to settle with a supervisor in the first meeting.
- Turn my current worry about my methodology into a question with two named options.
- What should I bring to a supervision meeting other than a draft?
- Help me bound an open request to read a whole chapter: purpose, criterion, length.
- Which of my meeting notes were directions and which were suggestions?