The 2010S
As we consider the issues of standards and supervisor training, where is supervision now? Let us first take up the issue of standards.
Need 1 From my perspective, the issue of standards is being most convincingly and compellingly addressed by means of the competency movement, which has been sweeping across the supervision landscape with gale-like force. Never has a singular shift had such a rapid, and all-pervasive impact on the entirety of the supervision enterprise. Competence, while always a concern of supervisory significance, has increasingly come into razor-sharp focus internationally in a way unthinkable two decades ago. And the advances that have been made in rendering supervision a competency based affair are largely a product of this past decade alone. As
Holloway (2012) has aptly indicated, competencies have well become the Zeitgeist of contemporary clinical supervision.
The three most substantial and comprehensive supervision competency frameworks have emerged from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (
Falender et al., 2004;
Psychology Board of Australia, 2013;
Roth & Pilling, 2008). While each framework has some distinctive elements, they all are highly similar in intent and content—providing specifics about the knowledge, skills/abilities, and attitudes that are expected for adequate supervision practice. Regardless of country of origin, six fundamental competency areas are given emphasis across all frameworks:
a.
knowledge about/understanding of supervision models, methods, and intervention;
b.
knowledge about/skill in attending to matters of ethical, legal, and professional concern;
c.
knowledge about/skill in managing supervision relationship processes;
d.
knowledge about/skill in conducting supervisory assessment and evaluation;
e.
knowledge about/skill in fostering attention to difference and diversity; and
f.
openness to/utilization of a self-reflective, self-assessment stance in supervision (
Watkins, 2013).
Each of the six broad, fundamental areas is composed of a host of more specific competencies that give definition to practical implementation. For example, some of those more specific competencies include ability to: form and maintain a good supervisory alliance (
Roth & Pilling, 2008); provide accurate and constructive feedback (
Roth & Pilling, 2008); establish supervision goals and objectives (
Psychology Board of Australia, 2013); attend to diversity and its impact (
Psychology Board of Australia, 2013); assess supervisee learning and developmental needs (
Falender et al., 2004); and set appropriate boundaries (
Falender et al., 2004). Those three frameworks have provided and continue to provide useful structure for conceptualizing and conducting supervision practice and training; they also each serve as eminently useful prototypes for other countries where competency framework development is being considered (cf.
Bang & Park, 2009;
Young, 2013).
What is vastly different now in supervision as opposed to the 1990s is the unrelenting, unapologetic accentuation of accountability. This push for accountability is evident across all supervision competency frameworks.
Falender and Shafranske (2012) captured the crux of this matter as follows:
… it is no longer acceptable to simply assume that competence has been attained. This critique challenges the implicit assumption that competence is necessarily or automatically achieved during the usual course of doctoral education and clinical training, and requires the explicit demonstration of competence. Such a shift involves an increased emphasis on evidence-based modes of assessment and places significant demands for accountability at all levels of training … (p. 129).
While Falender and Shafranske were specifically referring to doctoral education, their words about accountability and competence assessment also have relevance for supervision post qualification (cf.
Turpin & Wheeler, 2011). A stepped model of competency-based supervision, emphasizing assessment and accountability, is provided in
Figure 1. This stepped model seems to reflect the spirit of accountability that inheres in the Australian, United Kingdom, and United States competency frameworks, as well as other substantial competency initiatives now underway (e.g., the European Association for Psychotherapy’s ambitious 10-year project, The Professional Competencies of a European Psychotherapist [see Domain 9 for supervision competencies];
Young, Schulthess, Szysz-kowitx, Oudijks, & Stabingis, 2013;
http://www.europsyche.org/contents/13541/the-professional-competencies-of-a-european-psychotherapist).
But as these valuable frameworks continue to transform the supervision landscape, it seems vitally important that their novelty not be forgotten. The reality is that, while these frameworks offer much useful guidance, they are at most a decade old and by no means finished product. Any good supervision competency framework must be sufficiently comprehensive in scope, yet its
practical economy is equally important in determining the extent to which it gets embraced and implemented (
Watkins & Milne, 2014). Does the framework combine the best of practicality and parsimony and does it avoid being so onerous in design that it implodes from its own weight? And is the framework user friendly, accurately reflecting the realities of practice and being highly implementable across supervisors and settings? Those intertwined questions have yet to be answered definitively, but they are at the forefront of consideration. Some evidence can be seen in more recent efforts: (a) to economize upon existing frameworks and render them less wieldy, increasingly practical, and more user friendly (Hatcher, Fouad, Grus, Campbell, McCutcheon, & Leahy, 2013;
Rodolfa et al., 2013;
Schaffer, Rodolfa, Hatcher, & Fouad, 2013); and (b) to evaluate their in-the-field utility and acceptability to practitioners (
Owen-Pugh & Symons, 2013).
While all these recent efforts provide good foundation on which to build, more such work will clearly be required if the competency agenda is to most viably move forward. As Gonsalvez and Crowe (this issue) have indicated, “these frameworks have been arrived at through expert consensus and do not, at the current time, have empirical support, and are yet to demonstrate adequate predictive and construct validity” (cf.
Gonsalvez et al., 2013). Those are not small matters. For now, though still offering some instructive direction and guidance, available supervision competency frameworks might best be thought of as unfinished
works in progress that require further evaluation: “a resource that may need to be modified as our understanding of best practice improves” (
Owen-Pugh & Symons, 2013).
Need 2 Let us next turn our attention to supervisor training. Perhaps the greatest difference now in contrast to the 1990s is that there appears to be far wider international recognition and acceptance of the notion that if the most effective supervision services are to be provided, then supervisors need training in how to supervise. International evidence to that effect can be found in continued calls about the importance of such training (
Borders, 2010;
Szecsody, 2012,
in press), the specification of supervisor competencies and best practice behaviors that can be used for structuring training experiences (
Borders, this issue;
Falender et al., 2004;
Psychology Board of Australia, 2013;
Roth & Pilling, 2008), the growing number of training publications about educating supervisors (
Bernard, this issue;
Gonsalvez & Milne, 2010;
Watkins & Wang, 2014), and the slowly (but surely) developing body of research about the impact of supervisor training (
Milne, Sheikh, Pattison, & Wilkinson, 2011;
Sundin, Ogren, & Boethius, 2008;
Watkins, 2012a).
But acceptance of educational importance does not instantaneously translate into educational reality. As
Borders (2010) has rightly opined: “… [while] need for supervisor training is widely accepted … the practice of requiring, even offering, supervisor training in academic programs continues to vary rather substantially across disciplines …” (p. 130); her statement would also seem to apply when considering supervisor training offerings post qualification. However, that state of affairs has been changing across the last 15 years and continues to do so, with (a) supervisor training opportunities becoming more readily and widely available internationally and (b) required supervisor training even emerging as the new norm in some places. For example, beginning July 1, 2013, mandatory supervisor training went into effect for psychologists in Australia (
Psychology Board of Australia, 2013). Mandatory, ongoing supervision of supervision has long been a requirement in the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy; it also now plays a role in the ethical guidelines of the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy and Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia. As
Wheeler (2007) has aptly stated, “Career long supervision is high on the agendas of some organisations but not others” (p. 1). Yet based on evolving trends, I believe that safe prediction could be made that: The crucial importance of supervisor training and supervision of supervision will continue to be increasingly embraced worldwide, an ever growing number of supervisor training opportunities will become even more widely available internationally, career-long supervision will continue to slowly rise on the agendas of a growing number of professional associations and eventually become more established practice, and supervisor education will become a far more widely and increasingly researched topic around the globe. Indeed, in contrast to decades past, this last decade has seen ground-breaking attention given to and substantive direction provided for clinical supervisor training, and all indications point to much more of the same in the years ahead.
Yet with that highly positive shift noted, the supervisor training area remains much in need of careful scrutiny and far more substantive examination. Some particularly pressing needs that have been identified are (a) beginning to establish a more solid empirical or evidence base for supervisor training (e.g., through manual-driven education;
Milne, 2010,
2014), (b) studying transfer of training to actual practice (
Milne et al., 2011), and (c) giving attention to the much neglected supervision of supervision process (
Fleming, 2012). Supervisor training research thus far has been plagued by small sample sizes, primary reliance on self-report measures, and failure to employ control groups; unsurprisingly, researchers have uniformly embraced the need for more rigor in future investigations (
Watkins, 2012a;
Watkins & Wang, 2014). Correcting those deficiencies and “raising the bar’ on the rigor, relevance, and replicability of future supervisor training research” (
Watkins, 2012a, p. 301) seems to be the next step in most profitably advancing this vital area of inquiry.