All readers, regardless of their experience as a supervisor, come to the New Handbook of Counseling Supervision with a good bit of knowledge about the supervision process. Those of you who have been in the role of supervisee only still have ideas and opinions regarding what works and how you would ādo supervision.ā Chances are likely that you are right about many of your ideas. Those of you who have extensive supervision experience, whether trained as a supervisor or not, at the least have some practice-based observations and conclusions that probably can be found in the supervision literature. Quite simply, even untrained supervisors arrive at their first supervision session with a good bit of relevant training and experience. Certainly, all arrive with extensive training as a counselor, and everything learned in oneās masterās or doctoral program in counseling is relevant to supervision. Every Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Education Programs (CACREP) area addressed in our counselor education accreditation standards (CACREP, 2001)ācounseling theories, assessment devices, helping and consulting skills, change interventions, ethical and legal guidelines, lifespan development and career development theories, family and group dynamics, social and cultural foundations, research and evaluationāhas obvious application to helping a supervisee better understand and work with a client. Less obvious is the application of oneās counseling background for better understanding of and working with a supervisee. However, as a trained counselor, you know how to establish rapport and create a working relationship with your supervisee, you understand the implications of a superviseeās life stage to his or her approach to clients, and you are aware of the varied influences (e.g., family history, ethnicity, and gender) on your superviseeās behavior. Your knowledge of change mechanisms, including motivations toward and resistance to change, also are relevant to a superviseeās growth as a professional counselor. Both your empathic and your confrontive skills will be needed.
Those of you who have some teaching experience bring other relevant knowledge and skills to the supervision context, including your background in learning theories and instructional strategies. You know how to establish both short-term lesson plan objectives (a supervision session) and long-term unit plan goals (semester), and have experience in designing evaluations of progress. You understand the importance of flexibility in teaching strategies to address a variety of learning styles as well as the use of complementary strategies (e.g., didactic and experiential) and active learning approaches to consolidate learning. You have practice breaking down feedback into manageable chunks, concrete suggestions, and sequential steps.
Other professional backgrounds also have relevance for your work as a counseling supervisor. From consultation training, one has additional assessment and facilitation skills. From research courses, one understands the importance of ongoing evaluation of oneās work, as well as the skills for stating testable hypotheses, gathering relevant data from multiple sources, maintaining objectivity, and appropriately limiting the generalizability of your results to other supervisees. In fact, we have seen supervisors draw from their experiences in a wide array of professional experiences, including business (e.g., establishing a contract), computer and information systems (e.g., comfort using technology), dance (e.g., a fine sensitivity to body movements), engineering (e.g., ordering all the parts into a system), and theology (e.g., the relevance of grace and deep understanding of moral values underlying ethical decision making).
Clearly, the point here is that all new supervisors already have knowledge and skills highly applicable to their work as a supervisor. Why, then, is supervisor training needed? First, knowledge and skills from other professional areas are used in new and unique ways in supervision. You will use your counseling skills, but you will not be a counselor for your supervisee. You will use your teaching skills but will apply them in a specialized, nonclassroom setting, within an ongoing relationship. Part of supervision training, then, is learning how to apply existing skills appropriately in supervision. Second, it is quite important to have a framework for conducting supervision, a schema for organ...
