Collective supervision of Master's thesis students

Experiences, expectations and new departures from the Security Risk Management programme

Abstract

Collective supervision has become a common way to provide supervision at schools of higher education. This is also true for the supervision of master’s thesis students on the Master’s Programme, Security Risk Management at the University of Copenhagen. Based on experiences with collective supervision of master thesis students, this paper engages with the many understandings of feedback and learning in play in the teaching situation. In the scholarly literature, features such as multivoicedness, dialogue, process- and student-orientation are empha-sized when addressing collective supervision. Yet, our findings show a clash of expectations between a majority of the students (and supervisors) and these ide-als of collective supervision. Indeed, many students still believe feedback should be troubleshooting and product-oriented. In the final part of the paper we out-line a handful of ideas on how to improve future collective supervision to explicit-ly address the gap between expectations and conceptions of good feedback.