Questions About Reigniting Clinical Supervision
Less spoken about questions regarding clinical supervision and the upcoming course.
The Reigniting Clinical Supervision (RCS) course, cohort #13 is about to kick-off at the turn of the new year, 2nd of Jan 2023.
Here are five questions worth clarifying regarding the Reigniting Clinical Supervision (RCS) online course, that has been around since 2018.
1. "Isn't clinical supervision effective? I mean, I've benefited from it..."
Despite our intuitive sense of feeling benefit from clinical supervision, clinical research have shown that clinical supervision has little impact on actually improving client outcomes.
One of the leading researchers in clinical supervision, Edward Watkins Jr published a review called “What do clinical supervision research reviews tell us? Surveying the last 25 years”.
Key graf:
“Supervision, found to be positively associated with job satisfaction, job retention and ability to manage workload appears to be seen as helpful by supervisees and may even benefit their therapeutic competence (e.g. enhanced self-awareness, enhanced sense of self-efficacy).
But supervision’s favorable impact on outcomes is weak at best, yet to be proven.
Furthermore, the client has been, and continues to be, summarily neglected in supervision research: supervision’s impact on client outcome has yet to be proven.
Practising supervisors and supervisees tend to believe in, and have conviction about, the benefits, power and potential of supervision. But belief and conviction do not necessarily translate into empirical reality.” (emphasis mine)
Watkins, 2019, p. 13 & p. 16.
2. "Why are you so critical about clinical supervision?"
Admittedly, I am at times a contrarian. Actually, I hope I am critical without being critcising, as I’m often trying to close the gap between my intuition and what the clinical data says.1
I do have some things to say about the default approach to clinical supervision. I have had profound positive experiences from mentors who guided me in supervision, and I also had negative/adverse experiences from others as well.
Supervision, when conducted well, not only becomes a guiding light for us as a practitioner, but also translates into improvement in client outcomes.
My biggest critique is that for the most part, we haven't demonstrably translated what we learned from our apprenticeship into actual client improvement. (See The 7 Mistakes of Clinical Supervision).
In other words, we have a tendency to conflate feeling benefit and actual improvement.
That said, given what we've learned over the past decade from our studies in deliberate practice, the learning sciences, as well as our ground level work with clinicians and agencies from all over who have moved the needle, I believe there is a way forward.
But first, we need to angle at the right direction in order for right action.
In gist, we need to change the way we en-vision supervision (Sorry. Couldn't resist the pun).
How? We need to adopt a binocular vision, namely, Coach for Performance and Coach for Development.
3. "The skills of a supervisor is parallel to the skills of a therapist—isn't it?
Well, not quite.
Someone who is good at a football doesn't necessarily mean that they will be good as a coach.
For more about this, I've addressed this in detail in one of my blog posts.
4. Why is the course designed as "drip-by-drip" instead of a live event or entirely self-paced?
This is one of the features of the course that I was initially worried about, as I've gone against advice that I've received. The suggestions that I've gotten early on was this: Allow the learners to access to all the content as soon as they sign up, and then let them go at their own pace.
Out of a few hundred participants, there were a few participants who wanted to access everything at once. I'm sure there were others felt the same but didn't voice it.
However, what was intriguing for me, one of the biggest design feature of the course that many appreciated was the intentional spacing (i.e., 1 key content every Mondays and Fridays for close to 6 months) of the course.
They said this allowed them to
Process key information in manageable chunks and
Apply what they've learned in actual clinical settings between each module.
This spacing design was largely inspired by Robert Bjork and colleagues work on methods to enhance learning. Besides the above reasons, creating "desirable difficulties " by using spacing effects between each module also allowed participants to actively "retrieve and recall" from their memory bank, and actively synthesis prior learnings with new information.
RCS is not a traditional live online event. While I do enjoy facilitating and also being a participant in live virtual trainings, it’s not the best way to learn and translate what you are learning.
I also didn't want to do a "lazy job" of recording a live training and scale that online. It's not pedagogically effective. Plus, it's kinda of boring to watch.
Instead, I wanted to use the constrain and figure out a way to turn it into a net-benefit for improving learning.
Here are the key features of the course design:
One key applicable idea at a time.
Space between each module.
No specific time to login, but modules are delivered straight to your inbox every Mondays and Fridays.
Not just content, but community engagement via ongoing discussions.
No time-limit to access the materials. This allows learners to return to previous modules as they proceed in their own trajectories of development.
Given the previous point, I didn't want this to be a subscription model. Instead, it is a one-time fee for a life-time access.
One individual-consult (worth: $280) at no extra cost given to all participants so as assist in implementation and address obstacles in the real-world.
5. What Does RCS Actually Look Like?
Check out some the following link, or watch the video below to get a flavour:
And here’s a visual map of the terrain that we will cover in the RCS Course:
There are also free previews of selected modules in RCS. Feel free to browse through them.
Check out Reigniting Clinical Supervision (RCS)!
For other practical FAQs regarding the course for clinical supervisors, please see the RCS main page
Footnote:
I don’t think we should simply outsource all decision making to clinical data (see this post on The Tyranny of Metrics). In addition, it is vital that we not only learn from evidence-based practices, but also develop our own practice-based evidence.