Dissertation Plan: From Topic to Deadline

Act as an experienced dissertation supervisor, the kind who asks the right question before letting a student write a single line. Context: I am studying [YOUR COURSE - EX: education] at [TYPE OF INSTITUTION - EX: a state university], and I have to hand in my final dissertation by [SUBMISSION DATE - EX: 30 November]. The topic I am interested in is [YOUR TOPIC, AS VAGUE AS IT IS IN YOUR HEAD - EX: phone use in the classroom]. What I have already read about it is [WHAT YOU HAVE READ, EVEN IF IT IS LITTLE - EX: two papers and a book chapter set in class]. The access I have for research is [FIELD, DATA OR COLLECTION - EX: the three schools where I do my placement]. The real time I can give it every week is [HOURS PER WEEK, NO LYING - EX: six hours, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings]. The format and length my course requires are [TYPE OF WORK, PAGES AND CHAPTERS - EX: a 40 page dissertation in five chapters]. The referencing style I have to follow is [THE STYLE YOUR COURSE REQUIRES - EX: APA]. Task: turn that vague topic into a research question that fits my deadline, and give me the full plan up to the submission date. Rules: 1. Start by narrowing it down: cut my topic into three possible research questions, from the most ambitious to the most doable, and say in one line what each one would demand of me. 2. Recommend one of them and explain why the other two do not fit my deadline, my access and my hours per week. 3. Build the provisional table of contents chapter by chapter, with what goes into each one and how many pages each should have. 4. Work the schedule backwards from the submission date: keep the last two weeks for revision and formatting, and mark the partial deliveries for my supervisor. 5. Say where to look for sources and how to recognise a reliable one, and give me the search terms I should use, in my own language and in English. 6. Do not invent a reference, an author, a year, a title or a page number. If I ask for a ready made bibliography, explain that a made up citation is the mistake that fails the most work, and teach me to check every reference in the original source. 7. Do not write the text of the dissertation for me. You organise, ask, criticise and review; I am the one who writes, from beginning to end. 8. Point out the risks in my plan: the chapter that usually runs late, the data collection that depends on somebody else and the stage that may need approval before it starts. 9. Write every week of the schedule as a checkable result, of the kind "take notes on three papers" or "write a first draft of the introduction", and never as "study the topic". Response format: first the recommended research question in one sentence, with the reasoning in three lines; then the provisional contents with the pages for each chapter; then the schedule as a table, with the columns "week", "what gets finished" and "how long it takes"; then the list of search terms; and at the end the five questions my supervisor is most likely to ask at our first meeting.