Researcher Development Programme (RDP) course timetable

Engage in Learning is a theory and practice informed supervisor development programme on how to build supportive learning relationships. The programme is aimed at supervisors of Cambridge students with a minimum of three to five years’ experience of teaching in higher education.

Participants will explore challenges and approaches to building supportive supervisory relationships through dialogical learning activities — small group discussions, reflection exercises based on questions, film clips, case studies and dilemmas drawn from practice. Readings will be provided prior to each workshop. The programme will emphasise building on participants’ own experiences. Between each workshop participants will be asked to observe and keep a written log of specific experiences of supervision; these will be discussed in the subsequent workshop.

Workshops (key topics covered)
A maximum of 12 participants will attend four two-hour-long workshops. Each workshop will be held between 16:30 to 18:30.


26 January 2017
Workshop 1 (Principles 1 & 2)
Relationships for learning: theory, context. Building supportive relationships

• Attachment theory
• Mindfulness
• Institutional identity
• Communication

23 February 2017
Workshop 2 (Principles 1, 2 & 3)
Empowering and facilitation growth

• Growth mindset
• Relational power
• Transformational learning
• Self-efficacy

22 March 2017
Workshop 3 (Principles 1, 2, 3 & 4)
Maintaining a supportive relationship

• Boundaries
• Balance
• Dialogical reflection

25 April 2017
Workshop 4
Engaging in learning together

• Synthesis of themes and topics

Prior to registration please make sure that you are available on each of those days.

All workshops will be held at the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning, 25 Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1QA. The map gives directions to PPD, where the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning is located.

Do the terms ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’ intrigue you? Do you want to understand how they can be part of your future progression? There are many opportunities and programmes across this university for postdocs to get involved in coaching and mentoring in different ways. The overall purpose is to help postdocs understand the importance of being coached and mentored, and/or being a coach or a mentor. This short workshop introduces these two methods to explore what they are and how they can be helpful to postdocs. It will also direct you to where you can access these opportunities at Cambridge University.

Outcomes:

• Describe the terms ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’ in more detail.
• Differentiate between the two and identify situations for each that are specifically relevant to postdocs.
• Compose a way forward to plan for coaching and mentoring to be part of your personal, professional and career progression.

Feedback:

“Great trainer - very professional, supportive and helpful.”

“This was a great coaching and mentoring session. I liked the interaction with other people.”

“I like the approach to the topics covered. [There was] useful information that I would like to explore more to enhance my coaching and mentoring.”

It’s that time of year: the report is looming on the horizon and the reality of writing is here!

Aimed at first-year PhD students, this course is designed to get you thinking and working effectively on your end-of-first-year report / Certificate of Postgraduate Studies. How do you start? What is expected? How do you make it work for you? These and many other important questions, hints and tips will be addressed in this half-day session.

Outcomes:

• Understand the form and function of the first-year report
• Start planning the structure of your report
• Experience the benefits of editing and providing feedback on writing

Do you achieve the desired results from your presentations?
This interactive, individualised workshop, which centres on your delivery of a five-minute presentation, will help you communicate your research engagingly and effectively. In addition to reviewing useful patterns and styles of presentation, you will have the chance to observe yourself in action, as we will record and watch together your five-minute presentation. This workshop is for postdocs who want to achieve the greatest impact while presenting their work and to improve their public-speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment.

Outcomes
- Improve on designing and delivering a successful presentation
- Consider how to understand and engage your audience
- Observe yourself presenting and further develop your style

Do you achieve the desired results from your presentations?
This interactive, individualised workshop, which centres on your delivery of a five-minute presentation, will help you communicate your research engagingly and effectively. In addition to reviewing useful patterns and styles of presentation, you will have the chance to observe yourself in action, as we will record and watch together your five-minute presentation. This workshop is for postdocs who want to achieve the greatest impact while presenting their work and to improve their public-speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment.

Outcomes
- Improve on designing and delivering a successful presentation
- Consider how to understand and engage your audience
- Observe yourself presenting and further develop your style

Do you achieve the desired results from your presentations?
This interactive, individualised workshop, which centres on your delivery of a five-minute presentation, will help you communicate your research engagingly and effectively. In addition to reviewing useful patterns and styles of presentation, you will have the chance to observe yourself in action, as we will record and watch together your five-minute presentation. This workshop is for postdocs who want to achieve the greatest impact while presenting their work and to improve their public-speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment.

Outcomes
- Improve on designing and delivering a successful presentation
- Consider how to understand and engage your audience
- Observe yourself presenting and further develop your style

Do you achieve the desired results from your presentations?
This interactive, individualised workshop, which centres on your delivery of a five-minute presentation, will help you communicate your research engagingly and effectively. In addition to reviewing useful patterns and styles of presentation, you will have the chance to observe yourself in action, as we will record and watch together your five-minute presentation. This workshop is for postdocs who want to achieve the greatest impact while presenting their work and to improve their public-speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment.

Outcomes
- Improve on designing and delivering a successful presentation
- Consider how to understand and engage your audience
- Observe yourself presenting and further develop your style

Do you achieve the desired results from your presentations?
This interactive, individualised workshop, which centres on your delivery of a five-minute presentation, will help you communicate your research engagingly and effectively. In addition to reviewing useful patterns and styles of presentation, you will have the chance to observe yourself in action, as we will record and watch together your five-minute presentation. This workshop is for postdocs who want to achieve the greatest impact while presenting their work and to improve their public-speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment.

Outcomes
- Improve on designing and delivering a successful presentation
- Consider how to understand and engage your audience
- Observe yourself presenting and further develop your style

Do you achieve the desired results from your presentations?
This interactive, individualised workshop, which centres on your delivery of a five-minute presentation, will help you communicate your research engagingly and effectively. In addition to reviewing useful patterns and styles of presentation, you will have the chance to observe yourself in action, as we will record and watch together your five-minute presentation. This workshop is for postdocs who want to achieve the greatest impact while presenting their work and to improve their public-speaking skills in a safe and supportive environment.

Outcomes
- Improve on designing and delivering a successful presentation
- Consider how to understand and engage your audience
- Observe yourself presenting and further develop your style

The first step toward confident leadership is assured and well-balanced self-leadership. Are you really aware of how you lead yourself every day? This workshop aims to inspire you to be a self-leader by developing strategies to extend your awareness and confidence to take action and design the professional outcomes you are looking for. We will encourage you to think about how to recognise patterns of your own behaviour that might hold you back so that you can have the understanding and tools to communicate yourself and your perspective with awareness and confidence. This will create a firm foundation on which to build your leadership of others.

This workshop leads onto Postdocs: Leading Others. We recommend that you do these workshops after having first completed Postdocs: An Initial Guide to Leadership.

Outcomes

• Explore and experience your skills, strengths, abilities and style in detail within your individual context.
• Consider how to extend your own self-leadership on a daily basis through a variety of strategies.
• Apply self-knowledge, awareness and techniques to your repertoire of leadership skills.

Engage in Learning is a theory and practice informed supervisor development programme on how to build supportive learning relationships. The programme is aimed at supervisors of Cambridge students with a minimum of three to five years’ experience of teaching in higher education.

Participants will explore challenges and approaches to building supportive supervisory relationships through dialogical learning activities — small group discussions, reflection exercises based on questions, film clips, case studies and dilemmas drawn from practice. Readings will be provided prior to each workshop. The programme will emphasise building on participants’ own experiences. Between each workshop participants will be asked to observe and keep a written log of specific experiences of supervision; these will be discussed in the subsequent workshop.

Workshops (key topics covered)
A maximum of 12 participants will attend four two-hour-long workshops. Each workshop will be held between 16:30 to 18:30.


26 January 2017
Workshop 1 (Principles 1 & 2)
Relationships for learning: theory, context. Building supportive relationships

• Attachment theory
• Mindfulness
• Institutional identity
• Communication

23 February 2017
Workshop 2 (Principles 1, 2 & 3)
Empowering and facilitation growth

• Growth mindset
• Relational power
• Transformational learning
• Self-efficacy

22 March 2017
Workshop 3 (Principles 1, 2, 3 & 4)
Maintaining a supportive relationship

• Boundaries
• Balance
• Dialogical reflection

25 April 2017
Workshop 4
Engaging in learning together

• Synthesis of themes and topics

Prior to registration please make sure that you are available on each of those days.

All workshops will be held at the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning, 25 Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1QA. The map gives directions to PPD, where the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning is located.

How do you keep ideas flowing? Academia calls for researchers to generate original ideas and make novel contributions. Indeed, maintaining creativity is a key part of career progression. But how do you continue to come up with new ideas and questions or see fresh areas of research, especially while under the daily pressures of professional obligations?

The purpose of this experiential workshop is first to explore the subject of creativity and then to try out and explore different ways of thinking and practices that might help facilitate the generation of more ideas. We will also look closely at the connection between creativity and risk-taking and the great potential of this link. This course is for postdocs wanting to understand and expand their own creative minds.

Outcomes:

• Reflect on the importance of continuing to cultivate creativity.
• Explore ways of thinking and practices that help in the generation of ideas.
• See the connection between creativity and risk-taking.

It’s that time of year: the report is looming on the horizon and the reality of writing is here!

Aimed at first-year PhD students, this course is designed to get you thinking and working effectively on your end-of-first-year report / Certificate of Postgraduate Studies. How do you start? What is expected? How do you make it work for you? These and many other important questions, hints and tips will be addressed in this half-day session.

Outcomes:

• Understand the form and function of the first-year report
• Start planning the structure of your report
• Experience the benefits of editing and providing feedback on writing

Perhaps by virtue of being at the interface between the known and the unknown, research seems to be inherently stressful. This workshop will help you to build your emotional resilience by focusing on the 6 Cs of emotional resilience: Coping, Commitment, Challenge, Control, Community and (self-)Care.

Outcomes:

• Develop effective coping strategies
• Know practical ways to improve how you interact with and perceive your research
• Understand how to boost your self-care and sense of community

Research can be fraught with the challenges of working with others. This workshop will help you to develop assertive communication strategies, to enhance your everyday interactions with others. We will look at the differences between assertive, aggressive and passive behaviour, and you will learn how to develop an assertive mindset and use assertive language appropriately in day-to-day conversation.

Outcomes:

• Understand different types of thinking and behaviour
• Develop an assertive mindset
• Know how to use assertive language in day-to-day conversation

This course will be delivered by the University’s Research Governance and Integrity Officer and will introduce researchers to research integrity and ethics at Cambridge. The course will:

• explore the issue of research misconduct in academia and facilitate discussion of why and how it occurs
• explain the recent research integrity agenda and examine how this effects researchers
• discuss some of the challenges to the integrity of research and ask what individuals, groups and institutions can do to tackle them
• introduce the University’s research ethics system
• use case studies and discussion exercises to examine key issues

It’s that time of year: the report is looming on the horizon and the reality of writing is here!

Aimed at first-year PhD students, this course is designed to get you thinking and working effectively on your end-of-first-year report / Certificate of Postgraduate Studies. How do you start? What is expected? How do you make it work for you? These and many other important questions, hints and tips will be addressed in this half-day session.

Outcomes:

• Understand the form and function of the first-year report
• Start planning the structure of your report
• Experience the benefits of editing and providing feedback on writing

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

This might be an old cliché, but it's particularly true in research where (reportedly) over 90% of jobs go to a candidate already known to the employer. This half-day session will examine how you can make the most of conferences as an environment to strategically network and build research connections.

Outcomes:

• Know how to make attendance at conferences productive
• Start thinking about personal goals while attending conferences
• Understand practically how to network during and after a conference

A good poster’s worth 1000 words… but a bad poster’s just a bit of messy paper. When it’s time for you to present your scientific poster how are you going to make the most of the opportunity? We’ll think about why we use posters to present our research, what makes the difference between a good and bad poster and some useful tips to help you present your data in style.

Have you started a postdoc at Cambridge? Now is the time to create a plan for how you would like it to unfold. In this workshop, we will consider how to navigate the research landscape, how to think strategically about your strengths, and how to develop mental and emotional discipline for coping with how demanding and competitive the research environment can be. We will explore case studies illustrating that there’s no one recipe for success, but there are common ingredients. You will identify potential obstacles that might stand in your way as well as enablers that will aid your career progression. This workshop is for postdoctoral researchers who want to maximise their chances of succeeding in their chosen careers.

Outcomes:

• Devise an action plan for the near future including how to deal with the unexpected
• Learn how to identify enablers and obstacles to career progression and how to work with or around them
• Begin to take charge of your own career path

Feedback:

“It encouraged an overall view of thinking about my career and what I want out of it and what I am good at. It also covered examples of people who stayed in academia as well as those who did not, so that I was able to consider the pros and cons of more than just one route.”

“I'm right at the start of my post-doc and it helped me to think about what I wanted to get out of the next few years in terms of my career.”

It’s that time of year: the report is looming on the horizon and the reality of writing is here!

Aimed at first-year PhD students, this course is designed to get you thinking and working effectively on your end-of-first-year report / Certificate of Postgraduate Studies. How do you start? What is expected? How do you make it work for you? These and many other important questions, hints and tips will be addressed in this half-day session.

Outcomes:

• Understand the form and function of the first-year report
• Start planning the structure of your report
• Experience the benefits of editing and providing feedback on writing

It’s that time of year: the report is looming on the horizon and the reality of writing is here!

Aimed at first-year PhD students, this course is designed to get you thinking and working effectively on your end-of-first-year report / Certificate of Postgraduate Studies. How do you start? What is expected? How do you make it work for you? These and many other important questions, hints and tips will be addressed in this half-day session.

Outcomes:

• Understand the form and function of the first-year report
• Start planning the structure of your report
• Experience the benefits of editing and providing feedback on writing

Increasingly, successful researchers are expected to be leaders. This one-day event introduces participants to leadership by covering the 'four elements of leadership' and a set of tools to help you lead. To deepen the learning, you are given the opportunity to apply one of these elements with an associated tool, by leading a small group in an activity, who will then provide you with constructive feedback.

This workshop leads onto Leadership +.

Outcomes:

• Understand the four elements of leadership
• Develop the skills of: meaningful brainstorming; planning with the end in mind; listening to summarize
• Have increased confidence when leading

You know your stuff, but does your performance let you down? Presenting your research is an essential skill for a researcher, be it to your research group, at a major conference or even to a classroom of schoolchildren.

This is a highly interactive workshop that requires you to throw yourself into the activities. Everyone will be involved as we take some of the material from the online Presentation Skills Toolkit and try it out in a safe and supportive environment. Learn to project your voice, handle the dreaded Q&A, and work on getting better each time you present.

This workshop is particularly designed for those who feel less confident with the performance aspects of giving presentations. If you are comfortable standing up and talking in front of others then we recommend starting with the online Presentation Skills Toolkit.

Outcomes:

• Feel more confident in your ability to speak well
• Know some practical tips for handling nerves and questions
• Understand how to continue improving with each presentation