Peer Mentoring Circles being piloted at York, Feb-July 2025
Peer Mentoring Circles: Ahead of the roll-out of an extended pilot programme of peer mentoring circles across our Practitioner Partners, the University of York is currently running an internal pilot with 36 research supervisors in six cross-discipline groups.
Supervisor peer mentoring circles create a supportive space for supervisors from diverse disciplines, backgrounds, and levels of experience to engage in regular, facilitated conversations about supervision. Participants are encouraged to build trust, ask questions, share openly, challenge ideas constructively, and work together to solve problems. Each group co-creates its own approach, setting the topics, format, and ground rules to reflect their collective needs and priorities.
The benefits are numerous: opportunities to reflect, share best practices, build confidence, expand professional networks, gain new perspectives, and learn from more experienced colleagues - all within a supportive and collaborative environment.
At the University of York the Next Generation RSVP has piloted this approach to supervisor development over the last 6 months with 28 supervisors across 5 groups. Supervisors have been very positive about the experience sharing feedback such as:
"I've appreciated having space to learn from others about their experiences, and a constructive environment in which to go through the processes of supervision, the relationships, and identify and explore challenges and difficult issues. My feeling is that we often don't get a chance to learn from each others' experiences of supervision, for whatever reason, and that it is helpful to know what some of the things to look out for might be and to reflect on how one might or has responded in certain situations"
."..the mentoring group provides an opportunity to discuss and reflect on things that I don't feel confident about as a new supervisor, and whilst there are often no easy answers, I definitely feel that the process itself is helping me to build confidence."