Faculty Development

When the question has been reasonably clarified and the available literature on the subject has been read, it is  time to put support and supervision in place. Supervision needs to be carried out by someone with an interest in and understanding of the topic area. Alternatively, or in addition, for a larger project it is helpful to bring together a group of people who will be equally interested in the question. Research within a team is (usually) much more pleasurable than doing it alone: not only can you pool resources, but also a multi-disciplinary group in particular will bring different perspectives to the question to make its products more useful and acceptable. This is often one of the great strengths of educational and healthcare research.

Most of this module relates primarily to you as a clinical teacher thinking about your own educational research. Increasingly, as diverse routes for clinical academic posts are more widely introduced, some of you will also be responsible for supervising or advising on the research of others: postgraduate students, academic fellows or medical students taking an intercalated BSc. Many of the principles and activities we have discussed in this module will be appropriate to you as a research supervisor of educational research projects. Lamm (2002) found that research students want their supervisors to be:

• facilitative, namely:
  – approachable
  – practically available
  – encouraging, interested and enthusiastic
  – helpful with general and specific issues
  –validating
  – mutually respectful

• challenging, specifically:
  – forcing them to rethink ideas and arguments
  – pointing out weaknesses in research design, methods
  – searching out assumptions.

The implications are that supervisors need good interpersonal and communication skills and departmental and institutional support.

See the Teachers’ toolkit Criteria for good practice in research supervision and the Supervision module for a more generic consideration of educational and clinical supervision.