Peer Supervision among collagues and reflection

1. Peer Supervision among collagues and reflection by Lars Peter Jensen Associated professor Department of Electronic Systems

2. Agenda Peer lecturing Peer Supervision of project groups Peer Supervision among colleagues by observation Refleksion of experiences

3. Challenges for teachers in PBL to design a learning environment: motivating, stimulating, challenging for the students to manage the learning process: integrating subject matter participating in teamwork to facilitate learning: guiding the process without taking the lead guarding quality without hindering the process

4. Peer lecturing Why Training Supplementing Powering When New course Cross disciplinary Workshop

5. Peer Supervision of project groups Why Training Supplementing Powering When PhD students Cross disciplinary Adult education Story: 1 year student group at AAU with problems

6. Experimenting/sharing experiences with supervision/facilitation. In each Peer Group there is at least one who is going to supervise a student group in the autumn semester. The rest of the Peer Group should help him/her in the planning and assessment of one of the supervisors meetings with the student group. The supervisor selects a planned meeting soon. BEFORE the meeting the Peer Group gets together and discusses the meeting with the supervisor, and makes a plan for how he should supervise the students at the meeting. It will be an excellent chance to experiment by doing something differently than usual.

7. DURING the meeting the rest of the Peer Group acts as observers (this is legalized by the student group beforehand) and notes down what happens. AFTER the meeting the Peer Group gets together and the observers tell the supervisor about their observations and they all share the experience and reflect upon how to improve their own supervision. The experiment/discussions are documented in a small report (3-5 pages) telling what was planned, what actual happened and what is to be learned. The report is handed in to the lectures (XD, LPJ) in electronic form no later than the 10th of December.

8. 2nd semester Sport Science Pre-meeting: The purpose of the pre-meeting was to establish the intentions and the goals of the later supervisor meeting. We decided on the following 5 general issues that we would like to address and/or observe and include in our evaluation: Does all in the group know what is going on in different subgroups and are all members contributing? Do the group work together as a group about assignments, or have they split it up? How does the communication flow during a supervisor meeting? Do the person types correspond to Jespers initial impression of the group members? Discovering ‘nice to know’ things for supervisors.

9. 2nd semester Sport Science The supervisor meeting There was no formal agenda for the meeting but the group would like to discuss and have inputs on the two following issues: Presentation and comments of the collected data – so far. Input and ideas to the content of the contextual part of the report The meeting was moderated by Anne Sofie (Fie ) and Mathias was taking the minutes of the meeting. The meeting was in English, which might have been difficult for some of the members of the group. It could happen that this influences the desire to speak, though sometimes they switched shortly to Danish when they had difficulties.

10. 2nd semester Sport Science

11. 2nd semester Sport Science Other observations: Frequently the group members say: “I have done ...” or “I have made… should I do….” instead of “We have…” It was noted that four of the group members had laptops open, but only Mathias and Rasmus used them during the meeting. Rasmus had the results on the computer, which made it difficult for the others to see what they were talking about when discussing results. Post meeting: Generally we actually learnt more than we thought we would. Jose and Mikael agreed that it was very useful to watch the communication at a meeting rather than only listening to the content - as you would usually do.

12. 2nd semester Sport Science Conclusion: The supervisor should see/address the group as a whole, and not as individual persons doing individual work. We have noticed how import is the supervisor location at the meeting -which seems trivial beforehand. But try to be seated far away from the most speaking group member. A request for a formal agenda might improve the overview of the project within the group, and also helping the supervisor to give good advices. The meetings will also be more structured and efficient. The agenda should contain a presentation of the project status. It might be a good idea for a supervisor to try to see the group from the outside and try to think about how each individual is working with the group. Because it can easily be that you overlook these aspects when concentrate about the technical discussions at the meeting.

13. 7th semester Chemistry Before the meeting At the time of the meeting, the group is at a very early stage of the project. Therefore, it was discussed that the supervisor should be open-minded to the student’s ideas. In other words, the supervisor should ask facilitating questions that inspire the students to have reflexive thoughts. The students sent an agenda the day before the meeting. However, the agenda was not specific in terms of which topics should be discussed. This complicated the supervisor’s preparation for the meeting. For the future meetings, the supervisor should ask the students to send the agenda at least two days in advance. This ensures that the supervisor may follow up on the agenda before the meeting. Attached to the agenda, the students sent a literature review and a list of specific questions to the project. The literature review was the starting point for discussing question 1). Furthermore, the review served the purpose of informing the supervisor of the students’ current level.

14. 7th semester Chemistry During the meeting At the very beginning, the supervisor warms the students up with reminding them of the project goals and main problems, which was made clear in the previous first meeting. This helps the students to quickly get into the situation and confirms the basic ideas. The supervisor inspired the students to think in the direction of the problem by using the sentences “what if we do like this...?” and “what would be the difference between candidate number 1 and number 3 in this condition...?” etc. When the supervisor wants to transfer some knowledge, he always starts with the questions instead of providing the direct answer. When the students can no longer provide any information or argument on their preference, the supervisor asked the students to collect more information on the composition with the question mark and then make their decision.

15. 7th semester Chemistry After the meeting Overall, it was a successful supervisor meeting. Both the supervisor and students learned a lot from it. There was good interaction and communication between supervisor and students during the meeting because both parties to some extent were prepared before the meeting. However, we think the effectiveness of the supervisory could be improved with the following details. Firstly, it would be better if the supervisor could address several questions to students based on the reading materials provided to them before the meeting. This can improve the students understanding of the topic and facilitate the project work. Secondly, how to make a perfect balance between the supervisor’s guidance and students’ ownthoughts? We found that the supervisor should give the students as much freedom as possible to develop their own ideas. As a supervisor in PBL context, his/her responsibility is to facilitate the students’ learning process, to inspire them, and to facilitate their ability of exploring new knowledge rather than telling them the answer.

16. 7th semester Chemistry In our steering group, it was suggested that the supervisor should give some hints to the students’ selection of methods to avoid the students to become insecure. Furthermore, as mentioned by the supervisor himself that providing accurate key words to the students is quite beneficial for their self-learning practice. Lastly, the collaboration between the two students was inadequate, at least during this meeting. It seemed they did not know each others’ ideas before the meeting, instead they just kept asking questions from individual perspectives. As a supervisor, he or she should be aware that teamwork is as important as the individual effort, because semester project is a complex and difficult task to handle alone. Therefore, the supervisor can propose questions which need collaborative work between the students since it would be a gradual process for them to get familiar with each other and get used to working together. Summary To summarize, it has been a meaningful experience for both supervisor and students. As a supervisor, promotion of skills like open-minded thinking, encouragement, coordination, and strategic planning should be a focus point. It is expected that the skills of supervision can be improved based on this experience.

17. 9th semester EE foreign students Group Description • The group we studied is a 9th semester group which is composed of four French and one Italian. They just arrived in this semester as exchange students. Therefore, at the beginning, they didn’t know how the project is done in Aalborg University. • They have very different background since they are not from the same university. Only the Italian student has some experience in Matlab. All French students are new to Matlab. • This brings trouble to the project since the core work is investigating antenna diversity in indoor environment by Matlab simulation. • For supervision, one of our PBL group members, Chenguang Lu, is co-supervising the group with another supervisor.

18. 9th semester EE foreign students Observations • One student (the Italian) was very active/dominating - while the others were not. • Three students were late, and they did not seem to be able to catch the ongoing discussion between supervisor and the Italian student. • During this period one student stepped away from supervisor when she found that she could not catch their talking; • Some students are in short of basic theoretical knowledge, and the supervisor helped them patiently. • •Two of the students talked to each other in their own language during the meeting. • Neither agenda nor minutes of the meeting were prepared or taken.

19. 9th semester EE foreign students The meeting place was a big room, and students from other group were walking and talking nearby all the time

20. 9th semester EE foreign students

21. 9th semester EE foreign students Discussion The following sections discuss the key topics which arose during this exercise and present our reflections on these. • Setting the scene • The importance of the environment in which the meeting is held became quite obvious during the meeting. There was very much noise and interruptions due to the presence of many other students who moved inside the room. • How to draw everyone’s attention during the meeting • It is not surprising if there are one or several inactive students trying to be silent in the group. Drawing their attention and making sure they learn something during the meeting are the jobs of supervisors – else it would be wasting both parties time. Asking questions is always an efficient way. • The importance of an agenda • Help ensure more equal participation of all group members. • Maintain good group dynamics. • Keep time during the meeting. • Ensure the group sticking to the task at hand. • Minutes are easer to note down to each item discuss during the meeting. • The importance of minutes

22. 9th semester EE foreign students Dealing with split group • The core of the group work is good cooperation and coordination among the group members. This kind of working mode helps students not only grasp the academic knowledge but also foster their ability to communicate with others. The phenomenon of the ‘split’ group may result from various reasons, such as no mutual respect among group members; no matching time schedules; lack of understanding due to way of expression, comprehension and even language. Based on the specific case we have observed, we would like to propose the following suggestions, in the aim of facilitating them to get out of their situation: • Establishing a unified group rule and every one obeys this rule, such as the meeting time, unified language (English) during the discussion and meeting in the group. In addition, it may be helpful to have a group member as a group leader to make sure the execution of the group rule. • Discussion immediately when divergence turns up. In the presence of different opinion in the group, discussion is indispensable. • The project work could be evenly divided among all group members and each person is responsible for his/her work. It should be emphasized that every one has the duty to help others understand his/her work, as they are all responsible for the whole project together. • Having an internal meeting before meeting with supervisors. Every one presents his/her work during the past period of time, raises any problem he/she has met and discusses with others. After discussion, the group may list their common problem to discuss with supervisor.

23. 9th semester EE foreign students • In conclusion, the group should behave as a whole instead of individual person in terms of group working. Every one should have self-discipline on himself/herself to guarantee the group convergence and be open to help out the others. Conclusions • As a brief summary, we agree that we all benefited from this activity. The benefits attribute to our experience sharing and ideas exchanging during these weeks. It is very insightful to be a passive observer at the meeting as this provides an overview of the communication at the meeting and the spotting of some phenomena that are not so obvious when all the attention is on supervising.

24. 9th semester Health Technology To be learned from the experience We observed several good practices of the supervisor during the meeting: The supervisor rewarded the students with positive comments regarding the written material. The supervisor suggested the students to give a short seminar to another student group working within the same field in order to consolidate their knowledge and share it with their peers. The supervisor repeatedly reminded the students about their autonomy to choose how to proceed with their project. There was however one issue that could have been handled differently. One of the students was quite passive during the meeting and the supervisor failed to stimulate her participation.

25. Feedback rules Concentrate onobservablebehavior ! 1. Verbalize your observation: I see, I hear … 2. Mention the effect it has on you: I feel … 3. Give your interpretation of the observed behavior: I think … 4. Finish with a suggestion:Perhaps you could …

26. LEARNING EXPERIENCES POSITIVE NEGATIVE STUDENT TEACHER COLLEGUE POSITIVE NEGATIVE