Instructions from students to supervisors

In the following, you will be presented with two different ways of approaching a supervisor. You can use these examples to hand out to your students if you are supervising.

Group A

Hello Jens,

Here you have a draft for some analysis. Will you look at it and give us some feedback. We have of course not finished it, but we hope it will give you an idea of what we intend to do. Finally, we hope your feedback will give us some ideas to improve our text, so it can be even better.

Best
Group A

Group B

Hello Jens,

In this mail, we have attached the material we hope you will look at before we meet you tomorrow. To give you an overview, we have sent you a draft of the whole project. But we only want you to focus on how you think we answer question 2: Which focus is central in “Code of Conduct for employees”? The passages in the text are covered with yellow.

Then we hope you will quickly read question 3. We have only made a draft with a lot of ideas, and it is not finished at all. Tomorrow we want to create a dialogue with you as an inspiration for further work. If you have any questions before the meeting please send us a mail.

Best
Group B

These supervisor instructions differ a lot. The first one does not tell what the supervisor should focus on, and which problems the meeting should contribute to solve. To optimize the outcome of a supervisor it is important to instruct the supervisor on specific questions and tell which passages in the text he/she has to focus on.