I’ve gotten inquiries from a number of colleagues over the years about just how to go about doing supervision, with two main issues coming up:

1) What is the best way to handle supervision for someone who is not your employee?

2) How can you get started doing supervision by distance–what do you need, logistically, technically, etc.?

I’ll write some more later this week or next on the logistical issues and useful tech tips and so on. For now, let’s take a look at what it really means to supervise someone towards certification, vs. supervising your own employee.

First off, if you are working with someone at the required minimum number of supervision hours (usually 2-3 hours every two weeks, depending on how many hours your supervisee is working/accruing experience), and you have no other contact with their caseload, you are obviously not going to know as much about their clients as you would if you were present for intakes, reviewing all assessments, and having casual contact with your supervisee throughout the week. Just looking at the supervision time makes a huge difference between this type of situation and an employee supervision situation. That should put you into a different framework for your supervision–you cannot supervise the caseload, you need to be supervising the supervisee. I see this is as much more of a true “mentoring” or “coaching” relationship. One could argue that that is an essential part of any supervisory relationship, but if you’re not working with your own employee, it is pretty much the only type of supervisory relationship you can reasonably have. You can certainly give advice on client issues, and I always do–but that can’t be the primary focus of your supervision time, at least not every time. You need to have a focus on helping your supervisee develop the analytic problem-solving skills they need to be able to figure out issues with clients you haven’t even talked about yet, and clients they will go on to serve long after their time is up with you.

Similarly, you will not have a complete understanding of the work culture (or social culture, if you are working with someone at a distance) within which your supervisee is operating. Their workplace may use slightly different procedures than you do–there are a lot of “flavors” of behavior analytic teaching. Their workplace may have different formats for reporting, for data collection, lesson plans, you name it. It is not your workplace, it is theirs. However–this is a good thing. It should bring you both back to basics in terms of figuring out problems, rather than being able to rely on whatever procedures/processes are what you or they have just “always done”. It is a wonderful ongoing opportunity for reflective practice.

Having said that, I constantly have to reflect on whether or not I’m doing what I set out to do in a supervision meeting. It is easy to watch some video and then just chat about it. It’s not easy to keep coming back to whether or not your supervisee is progressing on their goals and acquiring the skills they need. Setting goals with supervisees–and remembering to check in on those every so often–is an important part of supervision. So is having some kind of task analysis of what you believe your supervisees need to be able to do. The BACB task list gives us some of this, but it is too broad for most supervision settings, and doesn’t give a lot of detail on what is one of the most important parts of practicing as a consultant–systems support and transfer of technology. You should do your own analysis for your particular setting/focus, but here is the outline of what I use, loosely, to structure my supervision in a variety of settings (both employee and non), plus I use a variety of checklists for supervisees to self-evaluate with.

Anyway, hopefully this has given you some food for thought. I’d be interested in hearing from others doing supervision–how do you structure your time? What difficulties have you found? What tips do you have for someone starting to do supervision?