Working as a researcher | Building supportive relationships

Sometimes you hit a wall and you need to say to someone ‘what is going on with me, am I on the right lines here?’ You just need someone else to look at it … quite a few times I have sent [my supervisors] an email with just a few questions, just to clarify my thoughts, and that has been fine.

I would compare them to mentoring … showing you the way, making suggestions but not trying to tell you what you should do. Being available to advise you when you are not quite sure what is supposed to happen.

One of the best things that my main supervisor did was to understand that I needed to be left alone and to work largely independently.

We can talk as a group on our cohort forum and that is very useful. I think sometimes when you hit a bit of a wall and you can talk to other people in the same boat as you that is really helpful because that is our classroom if you like, or our common room.

It was great to meet up with the other students on the programme … many students made friends with others and became ‘study buddies’.

I wonder whether I shouldn’t have started by finding out what the perception of the staff was and then tried to build on that perception through using research rather than saying ‘this is the problem’. I should have asked them perhaps what they saw as the problem.

Teachers initially were a little bit reluctant to be part of the research. … They suddenly started to panic ‘oh my goodness, she is going to come into class, is she going to start questioning what we do, how we do it, the mistakes we accidentally make etc. etc.’ … that sort of passed when they realised that wasn’t my intention at all, my intention was to make our job easier for us and at the same time a better learning experience for the students.

My work colleagues weren’t particularly interested in what I was doing despite several offers. … The one big support that I got was from my head teacher and if I needed to go out of school [to collect data] he would let me, we would find ways round it and I occasionally said ‘look, I don’t mind not being paid for the day but can I go to such-and-such a place?’

I have to admit that I did get far too into my EdD and became quite antisocial at home, until I was told.

My [partner] has always been fantastic so that is OK. My sisters are a little bit ... well we will talk about that for a moment and then we will go on to something else. I think they have found it quite hard, difficult to deal with.