If professors knew what professors know: A technique for capturing university teachers´ tacit knowledge of research supervision

Research indicates that conflict sometimes occurs in post-graduate student and faculty supervisor relationships. Some of these conflicts are resolved through dialogue and arbitration. Others lead to termination of studentships and change of supervisor. Yet some faculty have conflict-free supervisory relationships with their students. In both cases the supervisors concerned hold distinct tacit knowledge about the strategies and techniques they used or would have used in resolving such problems. Significant as this knowledge may seem, paucity of research exists to capture the supervisory knowledge. To address this gap, we introduced a technique to capture faculty´s tacit knowledge on graduate students´ supervision. In doing so, we hope that the technique would benefit fellow supervisors and newly recruited faculty members to avoid supervisory breakdown and to minimize error.