Handbook of Clinical Social Work Supervision

Carlton Munson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136615214
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

Take social work supervision into the new millennium!This newly revised edition of the classic text is a thorough, comprehensive guidebook to every aspect of supervision, including learning styles, teaching techniques, emotional support for supervisors, and supervision in different settings. Its detailed discussions of ethics and legal issues in practice are invaluable. Designed for use by busy supervisors, Handbook of Clinical Social Work Supervision, Third Edition, offers a new partnership model of supervision.Thoroughly revised and updated, Handbook of Clinical Social Work Supervision, Third Edition, addresses the dramatic changes in the field brought by new technologies and managed care. Numerous case illustrations and exercises supplement the text to facilitate classroom discussion or continuing education seminars. Assessment scales have been modified to conform to more recent data, and the questionnaires have been extensively revised. In addition, you will find significant new material on crucial topics, including:

• using DSM-IV categories for diagnosis and assessment
• how managed care has changed treatment planning, practice protocols, documentation, and other aspects of social work
• issues of cultural diversity, including respect for persons with disabilities and handling gender issues
• dealing with specific problems and populations, including domestic violence, substance and alcohol abuse, and child and adolescent treatment
• a model for managing organizational change
• social worker stress and burnout
• new directions for social work as a profession

Handbook of Clinical Social Work Supervision, Third Edition, will help you change your practice with the times by incorporating the capabilities of the Internet and other advanced technologies. It will also teach you to work around the restrictions created by managed care insurance plans. This bestselling textbook is ideal for classroom use as well as being an essential resource for any supervisor.

If psychotherapy supervision is really all

that important, then why is training in how

to supervise and become a supervisor

so limited?

C. Edward Watkins

Handbook of Psychotherapy Supervision

Teaching is even more difficult than

learning . . . because what teaching calls

for is this: to let learn. The real teacher. . .

lets nothing else be learned than learning.

Martin Heidegger

What Is Called Thinking?

Chapter 1

Introduction

This chapter is an overview of supervision. Background conceptions, a definition of clinical supervision, and the function of supervision are covered. The interactional framework that serves as background for subsequent chapters is summarized. Current issues and conditions that give rise to the need for supervision are delineated. Characteristics of supervisees and supervisors are summarized along with factors that need to be considered when becoming a clinical supervisor.

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK

If this book delineated all the things the supervisor must know and do in order to be effective, helpful, and appreciated, after reading it, most people would ask, Why would anyone want to become a supervisor? The answer to this question is complex, but to save time and space, it can be answered with, Because supervisors want to be effective, helpful, and appreciated. Otherwise, we would have chosen some other, less humane endeavor as a career. The actions of a supervisor have a ripple effect for the supervisee, the supervisee’s client, the client’s family, colleagues of the supervisee and supervisor, and others (Bradley and Ladany, 2001). These radiating effects can be positive or negative depending on the skill of the supervisor. This book is aimed at enhancing the skill of the supervisor and maximizing the positive effects of supervision.

Few supervisors have the luxury of devoting all their time to their supervisory roles, so they must be highly organized and efficient to be successful, helpful, and appreciated (Munson, 2000c). Some people find that supervision is more demanding than they expected, and they return to practice activities full-time. Others resign themselves to limited effectiveness, proceed through trial and error, become cynical and disillusioned, and pass this attitude on to their supervisees (Hess, 1992). Some struggle to do a good job and work harder and harder until they eventually succumb to distress. In all three of these situations, the knowledge and skills of good people are not passed on to the next generation of practitioners. The social work profession cannot afford such losses.

Some supervisors continue to be dedicated, calm, and steadfast in their commitment to helping others and remain a consistent source of support and inspiration for their supervisees. These are the supervisors who were identified and studied in depth, and what was learned from them became the basis for the content of this book.

This book is designed to help the profession avoid the loss of transmission of this knowledge and skill and to facilitate the passage of practice wisdom from one professional generation to the next. The desire is that the practices and guidelines presented here will make the supervisory job easier without sacrificing substance and quality. When supervisory responsibility has been abandoned or avoided, it has been because of inadequate coping mechanisms. It is simply less demanding or more rewarding for some professionals to devote themselves to other endeavors and not accept the responsibility of supervision.

Social work professionals are fortunate to live in an era and work in a professional generation that can trace its supervisory heritage directly to such people as Mary Richmond, Jane Addams, Bertha Reynolds, Porter Lee, Mary Conyngton, Lucille Austin, Ida Cannon, Frances Scherz, Yonata Feldman, Fred Berl, Dorothy Hutchinson, Jessie Taft, Virginia Robinson, and Sigmund and Anna Freud. The author has interviewed, talked with, and read the published and unpublished works of many colleagues who studied under and were supervised by these great contributors to the profession’s knowledge, skill, and practice. The author has been supervised and taught by people with such connections to the profession’s heritage and feels a part of a legacy that sustains a commitment to the profession of social work.

Through the author’s supervisory work, teaching, and through this book, the hope is to make a contribution to passing on this legacy and to promote the possibility of others doing the same. Many students and supervisees think social work began some time around 1960. If the social work profession is to endure, an understanding of and appreciation for social work practice and supervision history must be transmitted to the next generation of supervisors and practitioners. This book is focused on that transmission process, and Chapter 2 highlights the history of supervision.

The decision was made to write this book because there has never been one devoted exclusively to clinical social work supervision. That no such book has been written in the past is difficult to understand, given that casework has been the foundation of the profession since the beginning and that clinical treatment has, in the past decade, reemerged as the major practice area. Social work treatment has remained the major area of specialization among graduate students. Social workers are the largest professional group delivering psychotherapy services in the United States, and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) has reported that social workers are the largest single professional group offering treatment services in mental health centers—and the numbers continue to increase.

From 1987 to 1997, the percentage of social workers practicing in mental health increased from 28 to 40 percent of NASW membership (NASW, 1991:5; Gibelman and Schervish, 1997), and by 1999, there were 192,814 clinically trained social workers in the United States, which is more than the combined totals for the other three core mental health professions: psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses (O’Neil, 1999). Approximately 48 percent of these clinically trained social workers have some form of employment in the mental health field. Approximately 44 percent of social workers who are NASW members report that they are supervising, and/or teaching and training (Gibelman and Schervish, 1997). These data indicate that a significant number of social workers are performing mental health practice and related supervisory functions. The few books that have been written on supervision have a much more general approach to the topic than is helpful to supervisors in such clinical settings and situations.

At a broader level, social work education has increasingly placed emphasis on generic skills, even though specialization in agencies has expanded greatly. This basic incongruity has led many agencies and organizations to place renewed emphasis on supervision as a means of overcoming this gap between educational focus and practice demands. Supervisors attempting to help new practitioners develop their skills have few guidelines to use. This book attempts to provide practical guidelines to assist the supervisor of clinical practitioners. The position taken in this book is that the era of generic practice has passed. Knowledge of human behavior and mental disorders is so vast, complex, and focused that generic interventions can be confusing and inadequate.

Most books on supervision have focused on what to learn and on how to learn clinical work through supervision. This book covers the essential aspect of supervision, but another component has been added by placing this material in the framework of the supervision process itself. What has to be learned about and done in practice is presented in the context of how the supervisor acts—what the supervisor says, hears, and writes. Organizationally, supervisors receive limited training, feedback, and support group help for what they do. This book is for and about supervisors.

BACKGROUND RESEARCH STUDIES

Throughout the book reference is made to research studies done by the author. Some of these studies have been reported in the literature, and they are cited and referenced in the text. Others have not yet appeared in the literature. Rather than repeat the details of these studies in the text each time they are referred to, the studies are listed here and are assigned an alphabetic reference code:

• A survey of thirty-four graduate students, representing a 10 percent random sample of students in one school of social work. The students completed questionnaires regarding their clinical activity and their supervisory activity (Study A).

• An intensive content analysis of the supervisory experience of three graduate social work students. Weekly one-hour research interviews were done over a nine-month period in which supervision activity was systematically analyzed based on the students’ perceptions (Study B).

• A study of twenty-six field instructors selected at random from all the field instructors at one graduate school of social work. Each participant was administered an interview schedule that took an hour to complete. The supervisors were surveyed regarding their style of supervision, theoretical orientation, and philosophy of supervision and practice. In addition, demographic data were gathered (Study C).

• A survey of 183 workers and supervisors in a department of public welfare regarding their experiences in and attitudes toward super– vision. The questionnaire also included a series of questions regarding the amount of stress the participants had experienced (Study D).

• A survey of eighty-two graduate students in a school of social work regarding the degree of stress they experienced in connection with classroom and field components of their educational program (Study E).

• A survey of forty clinical social work practitioners regarding their therapy work with respect to type of therapy performed, theoretical orientation, cotherapy activity, and conflict with colleagues (Study F).

• A survey study conducted through interviews with thirty practitioners regarding the styles of administration of supervisors and administrators. This study resulted in six administrative types that have been compared with over 300 practitioners to test the accuracy of the classifications (Study G).

• A content analysis study of videotape sessions of master therapists. The tapes of Ackerman, Bowen, Framo, Minuchin, Papp, Rubentstein, Satir, and Whitaker were analyzed for common techniques and themes. This resulted in the development of the SEES classification system (Style, Enabling, Encountering, and Shifting dysfunction) of intervention sequences (Study H).

• A survey of fifty social workers’ knowledge of the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics through administration of a fifty-item instrument (Study I).

• A study of the structural, authority, and teaching models used in nineteen agencies in the Northeastern United States. The sample consisted of sixty supervisors and sixty-five supervisees. Numerous variables were studied in relation to the different models of supervision (Study J).

In addition to these formal studies, case examples are used as well as comments made by supervisors and supervisees in connection with teaching, consultation, and training done in various settings. Throughout the book, empirical research findings are blended with practical observations to form sound, logical, reasonable suggestions and recommendations for supervisors. Questionnaires used in some of this research can be found in the appendixes.

STYLE OF READING

Although many suggestions and guidelines are offered for use in supervision, the author has refrained from providing any suggestions on how to read this book to avoid hampering creative use of it. The only suggestion is to follow the advice of Virginia Woolf (1960/1932):

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions, (p. 281)

Given Woolf’s suggestion, only one recommendation is offered: the reader should avoid becoming defensive about his or her own practices in light of the new and different guidelines suggested in this book, because the moment a person become defensive, learning ceases. Again, Woolf advocates a point of view that is recommend to the reader:

Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other, (p. 282)

Abstract discussion in this text has been minimized and used only to lay the foundation for the practical guidelines that are offered. The book is designed as a text for learning good supervisory practices through formal academic course work, but it can also serve as a resource for the practicing supervisor. The theoretical material and practice principles are interlaced with case material to illustrate major points.

Each chapter concludes with a list of suggested readings, including brief summary statements about the usefulness of each citation. These suggested readings were drawn on for much of the material in each chapter and can be used to supplement that particular chapter. These lists can be a quick reference tool for the busy educator and supervisor who does not have large blocks of time available to engage in many hours of extensive library research.

The concept of style is used a great deal in this book because it is a basic, but powerful, term that can be used to organize large amounts of helpful information. Style is defined and then used to identify the major styles of supervision. Little has been written elsewhere about style as a concept. In the research done for this book, the concept of style evolved as useful in formulating techniques for supervisory practice. The ideas about style used here have evolved over thirty years of clinical supervision practice and research activity.

In this book the terms practitioner, worker, clinician, and therapist are used interchangeably. These terms are used to refer to those actively engaged in short-term and long-term contact with clients for the purpose of intervention to resolve problems in functioning. The terms client and patient are used interchangeably.

Edgar Allan Poe believed that to make an impression, any literary work must be able to be read in one sitting. This rule of brevity has been kept in mind while writing this book. Each chapter is constructed as a reference source so that the supervisor and/or supervisee can come back to it many times until the suggestions and guidelines become a natural part of the supervisory process. Each unit within a chapter ...