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to be taught, is highly motivated to teach it, has a high level of teaching skills, is capable of designing an effective learning program, is enthusiastic about his subject, and has respect for and confidence in his learners. The neces- sary knowledge base required for good educa- tional supervision is not confined to the subject matter of content to be taught. It extends as well to necessary knowledge about teaching tech- niques, knowledge about the student who is the learner, and knowledge of the teacher about himself or herself.

Our interest is in how learners learn. The supervisor needs to be aware of some of the factors that facilitate learning and know some- thing about techniques that maximize it. In this section, we outline some general principles of learning and some techniques derived from these principles that are applicable to the super- visory conference.

Principle 1: People Learn Best If They Are Highly Motivated to Learn In applying this principle, the supervisor can use the following techniques.

1. Explain the Usefulness of the Content to Be Taught The supervisor owes workers some explanation as to why it might be important for them to know the material if they are to dis- charge his professional responsibilities effec- tively. Motivation increases as usefulness of the content becomes clear. The new worker may not appreciate the importance, for instance, of learning effective referral procedures. If the supervisor can show, by citing the relevant

Conditions for Effective Teaching and Learning: Introduction In implementing the responsibilities of admin- istrative supervision, the supervisor acts as a manager. In implementing the responsibili- ties of educational supervision, the supervi- sor acts as a teacher. The previous chapter was concerned with what the supervisor teaches. The present chapter is concerned with how the supervisor teaches to catalyze learning. It is further concerned with some of the problems in implementing the process of educational supervision.

The supervisor’s principal responsibility in educational supervision is to teach the worker how to do the job. Our task here is to delineate what promotes effective teaching and learn- ing. The teacher can organize content, provide a suitable atmosphere for learning, and make learning available; however, the teacher cannot ensure its acceptance and certainly not its use— only the learner can do that. Teaching is essen- tially the art of assisting another to learn. As Robinson (1936:128) said, “Teaching provides the subject matter, the stimulus, the materials, sets the tasks and defines the conditions. But learning is the process of utilizing opportunity and limits in one’s way for one’s own ends.” Learning is a creative personal experience.

The supervisor, in implementing educational supervision, has the responsibility of knowing the content that needs to be learned, of know- ing how to teach it effectively, and for creating, sustaining, and managing an interpersonal environment that facilitates learning. The good teacher has expert knowledge of the content

C h a p T E r 5

principles and problems in Implementing Educational Supervision

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 4 . C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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to goal seeking.” Intrinsic motives are tied to the content itself. People want to study the con- tent because they are interested in the material, because there are intrinsic rewards in meet- ing and mastering the challenge of the content (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988), and because there is pleasure in acquiring knowledge that helps solve professional prob- lems (Gleeson 1992).

Motives may be largely extrinsic, however. Learning the content is only a way of reaching subsequent goals. There may be psychic rewards from the approbation of peers, the supervisor, parents, and one’s own professional superego. Other psychic rewards are derived from com- petitively learning better than sibling-peers in the agency. Learning the content may be moti- vated by a desire for autonomy and indepen- dence, so that one does not have to turn to the supervisor for help. There may be administra- tive rewards, such as pay raises and promotions.

Motives for learning may result from a devel- oping commitment to the agency, its staff, and its objectives. Having a strong conviction in the agency’s objectives, the worker wants to see them achieved as effectively as possible. Moti- vation is strengthened by identification with the agency and colleagues. Feeling identified with the agency, the worker wants the agency to be favorably perceived by the community; feeling loyal and close to his colleagues, the worker wants their good opinion. As a consequence of these considerations, the worker is motivated to learn so as to be as competent as possible.

Research on the nature of job satisfaction helps clarify the incentives that are likely to motivate on-the-job learning. Influential stud- ies on job satisfaction have been done by Herz- berg and his group in a wide variety of contexts (Herzberg 1968; Herzberg, Mausner, and Sny- derman 2005). Although the work itself may be the best predictor of job satisfaction after controlling for personal and job characteristics (Smerek and Peterson 2007), five factors were identified as the principal sources of job satis- faction for most people. Arranged in order of

research, the sizable percentage of people who need referral service and the effects of different referral procedures on subsequent client expe- rience, the worker may better understand the significance of this unit of learning. The adult learner (Goldman 2011; Memmott and Bren- nan 1998) is concerned with current problems that require learning for solution. In teaching- learning situations involving adults, the super- visor can take advantage of this orientation by stressing the utility and applicability of what is learned.

2. Make Learning Meaningful in Terms of the Individual Worker’s Motives and Needs How- ever useful or significant the material is gen- erally, the worker is not likely to be motivated unless one can show its usefulness and impor- tance for a problem or situation that is meaning- ful to him or her. Showing how the supervisee could have improved on the last interview if he or she had had a surer grasp of the dynamics of behavior will do more to increase motivation than lectures on the general importance of such knowledge.

When the training is close to the job of the worker, it is more specific to the worker’s prob- lems and more directly perceived by the worker as meeting his or her needs and satisfying his or her concerns. This has been found repeatedly in studies of in-service training in child welfare (Brittain and Potter 2009).

3. Tie Areas of Low Motivation to Areas of High Motivation The worker may be highly motivated to help the client but indifferent to the content the supervisor is attempting to teach (e.g., evaluating social work practice). If the supervisor can demonstrate that monitor- ing practice outcomes permits the worker to be more helpful to the client (Worthen and Lam- bert 2007), the worker may then be motivated to learn ways to do it.

One needs to be aware of the variety of the possible motives for learning. Motivation is “an internal process initiated by a need that leads

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worker may be right, in which case the supervi- sor has nothing to teach him or her.

If the supervisor, however, is convinced that the worker’s perception of his performance is wrong and that there is much the worker needs to learn, the supervisor would first have to stimulate dissatisfaction with the worker’s per- formance. The supervisor may want to confront the worker with the gap between what he or she is doing and what he or she can do, needs to be done, or wants to be able to do. Dissatisfac- tion with current performance is a necessary prerequisite before the worker is ready to learn new and better ways of working with the client. The worker is more likely to be motivated when he or she is somewhat uneasy (Stoltenberg and McNeill 1997).

Consequently, the supervisor should make a deliberate but compassionate effort to create some desire for, or curiosity about, the learning he or she has to offer. Rather than being passive in the face of lack of motivation, the supervisor acts as a catalyst for change, creating tension that needs to be resolved. The worker’s equi- librium needs to be disturbed if receptivity to learning is to be stimulated.

At times, the “supervisor must awaken anxiety by penetrating the rationalization and defenses that bind it. If the supervisor avoids conflict for purposes of keeping the supervisory relationship untroubled and outwardly smooth, he will have abdicated his responsibility to the supervisee and will have compromised his trustworthiness” (Mueller and Kell 1972:30–31).

Motivation for learning follows the general principle that all behavior is purposive. People learn only when they want to learn or when they feel a need to learn. Although this justi- fies stimulation of a need, such a procedure may be unnecessary. The first assumption about an apparently unmotivated supervisee might well be that the supervisor is not sensitive enough to discern the motives that the worker has. It would initially be better to attempt to under- stand and use those motives that the learner himself brings to the situation. The supervisor

frequency, these factors are achievement (feel- ing pleased with something done in which one would take pride), recognition (good work was commented on and complimented), the work itself (the work was interesting, challeng- ing, varied), responsibility (freedom to do the work independently and autonomously), and advancement (the possibility of moving up to more responsible positions). These factors can be used to motivate learning (Weikel-Morrison 2002). For instance, there is greater possibility of meeting the need for achievement if the worker learns how to do the job more effectively; learn- ing to do the job increases the probability that the worker will be granted more responsibility and more opportunity to work independently; and learning to do the job enhances the pos- sibility of advancement.

Supervisors would do well to utilize any and all motives to optimize learning. If the worker wants a promotion or raise or a student wants a high grade, these motives can be tied to the need to learn the content as a requirement for achieving their goals.

Motivation increases receptivity to learn- ing and makes energy available for learning. It thus sets the stage for learning and provides the teachable moment, but it does not in itself make for learning. The supervisor has to take advantage of the teachable situation to teach something of significance. Motivation needs to be provided with a learning opportunity and direction. The supervisor provides guidance to the learning that motivation seeks.

4. Safeguard, Stimulate, and Instill Motivation Because motivation is of such crucial signifi- cance, the supervisor needs to safeguard and stimulate motivation where it exists and instill motivation where it does not. Motivation indi- cates a readiness for learning. A worker who lacks motivation to learn certain content may have no felt need for it. The worker is satisfied with what he or she is doing and in the way he or she is doing it. The worker has no problem that requires additional learning for its solution. The

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permit the supervisor to measure progress. As Seneca said, “No wind is favorable if you do not know your destination.” People learn best if the objectives of learning are clearly identi- fied, if they know what to look for, and if they have a sense of priorities. However, Shulman (1991:166) reported: “When I ask participants in my supervision workshops to spell out their sense of their role . . . most tell me they never had a supervisor who was clear about purpose and role.”

2. Respect the Worker’s Rights, Within Limits, To Determine His or Her Own Solutions The structure, although supportive in its clarity, should not be so rigid that it becomes restric- tive. Supervisory rigidity contributes to poor supervisory experiences (Nelson and Fried- lander 2001; Quarto 2002). Some flexibility needs to be permitted the supervisee so as to prevent psychic energy from being diverted from learning to deal with rising hostility and resentment at infantilization. This is par- ticularly true in adult education because the learner operates with considerable freedom and autonomy in other significant areas of his or her life. Here, however, the worker is par- tially dependent, as is every learner who needs to turn to others to teach what he or she does not yet know. As a generally independent adult, the learner is more apt to resent this necessary dependency. The supervisor should then per- mit the greatest amount of independence that the learner can profitably use without danger to the client. Respect for the worker’s auton- omy and initiative ensures that psychic energy necessary for learning will not be dissipated in defense of autonomy.

3. Establish a Safe and Secure Atmosphere Establish an atmosphere of accepting, psy- chological safety and a framework of security (Shulman 2010). Learning implies a risk of mistakes and a risk of failure. It implies, too, a confession of ignorance. A worker who fears censure and rejection for admitting failure or

might need to recognize that in some cases the problem is not that the worker is unmotivated but that he or she is differently motivated. The problem is not lack of motivation but differ- ence in motivation. Discovering the nature of these different motivations, the supervisor might be able to exploit them in the service of motivating learning.

Principle 2: People Learn Best When They Can Devote Most of Their Energies to Learning Energy needed to defend against rejection, anxiety, guilt, shame, fear of failure, attacks on autonomy, or uncertain expectations is energy deflected from learning. Using the following techniques, the supervisor can maximize the amount of energy available for learning.

1. Provide Structure Providing structure means clearly establishing the time, place, roles, limits, expectations, obligations, and objectives of supervision (Freeman 1993). Providing struc- ture mitigates anxiety by focusing learning. If workers are anxious because they are uncertain of what is expected from them in the role of supervisee, then they are not fully free to devote full attention to learning (Costa 1994). There- fore, the nature of the supervisory relationship should be clear. The frequency of supervisory meetings, the length of such conferences, the respective responsibilities, expectations, and obligations of supervisee and supervisor in preparation for, and in the conduct of, such conferences should be clearly established, mutually understood, and mutually accepted. Such details provide the comfort of an unam- biguous structure.

Clarity relates to learning objectives as well (Ching 1993; Talen and Schindler 1993). The supervisor needs to know, and to share with the supervisee, some idea of where he or she hopes the learner is going—what the worker will know and be able to do after learning what the supervisor hopes to teach. Objectives give meaning to each discrete learning unit and

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it was that I was supposed to be thinking about. (Herrick 1977:95)

Learning does not merely result in adding knowledge and skills to those already avail- able to the learner. Learning involves the risk of change in attitudes, values, and behavior as the new learning modifies the perception of the world and of people. The risk of change is anxi- ety provoking. People often fear what the con- sequences of change might be for them. If the supervisor is empathic in regard to the anxiety created by change resulting from learning and is supportive, there is less of a need to devote psychic energy to defend against change and to bind associated anxiety.

However, acceptance involves expectations. Psychological safety does not mean a permis- siveness that ignores the demand for adequate performance on the part of the worker. The supervisor must make firm demands on the worker for learning what he or she needs to learn. However, those demands should be made in a friendly way, out of a desire to help rather than to hurt. They do create tension. However, such tension is necessary to motivate the super- visee to learn.

The supervisor has to be consistently helpful to the supervisee rather than consistently popu- lar. This means challenging error, calling atten- tion to ignorance, and pointing to mistakes and deficiencies in performance. The supervisor has to offer a judicious balance between stimulus and support. The supervisor is responsible for maintaining the balance between a degree of tension that motivates and challenges and a degree of tension that immobilizes. The super- visor should use the tension that derives not from the fear of failure but from the discrep- ancy between what the worker knows and what he wants to know. It involves making demands with the utmost possible respect, compassion, and understanding. It would be foolish to pre- tend that balancing these contradictory and vaguely defined variables is anything but the most difficult of tasks.

ignorance will devote psychic energy to defense against such anticipated attacks. The supervi- sor should be the supervisee’s mentor rather than tormentor. An atmosphere of acceptance permits a freer involvement in risk-taking and a greater psychic concentration on learning rather than on self-defense. Learning takes place best in an interaction that permits, if it does not condone, mistakes and recognizes the ambiguity and indefiniteness of the available answers.

The effects of the supervisor’s attitude of acceptance on the worker’s performance were described by a worker:

I didn’t feel that I was getting criticized for what I was doing. So a lot of my feelings of anxiety and discomfort began to dissipate as I was not getting criticism from him: therefore, I wasn’t criticiz- ing myself—as harshly anyway. And I was feel- ing more comfortable. As I began to feel more comfortable—the more comfortable I felt, it’s like the more ready I was to take that more critical look at what I had done. The more sure I felt that I wasn’t a complete asshole, that I wasn’t blowing it right and left, that I was OK in the room—I wasn’t going to permanently damage anybody or any of that—and that the person I was presenting was really myself and not something that I was trying to do for my absent supervisor, the more ready I became to ask questions of myself and what I was doing in technique and all that. It wasn’t laden with all the feelings and all the anxiety and all that. (Herrick 1977:136)

The impact on the supervisee of a supervi- sor who communicates nonacceptance was described by a supervisee:

I would just get angrier and angrier inside and I would get tighter and tighter and more closed, and whatever it was that we were supposed to be talking about around my client no longer became important because the dynamics that were going on between the two of us were so heavy that I couldn’t even think about whatever

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the fact that at least the supervisor knows the answer to some of his or her questions—and is willing to share this knowledge with the worker, if necessary. If the supervisor does not know or seems unwilling to share this knowledge, tension increases because it suggests to the supervisee that he or she faces the prospect of dealing with situations for which no adequate assistance is available. Inevitably, on some occa- sions, the supervisor might have to say, “I don’t know.” However, the supervisor then needs to add, “We will try to find out.”

Lack of knowledge in a situation that requires responsible action is anxiety provoking. Know- ing that someone knows and is ready to pro- vide the helpful knowledge diminishes anxiety. It might be noted that supervisor competence rather than omniscience is all that the super- visee does, and can, expect. However, the greater professional competence of the supervi- sor can help to meet the supervisees’ legitimate dependence needs. The supervisor has to be capable and ready to meet these needs (Ben- nett 2008; White and Queener 2003).

The negative effect on the supervisee when perceived legitimate dependency needs are thwarted was described by a supervisee:

And sometimes her tone would get condescend- ing: “Now, B., you’re bright. You can think of that.” For instance, if I was having difficulty with something and asked for some suggestions, that would be the sort of response she would give me. It was like, unless I did everything on my own, I wasn’t putting forth enough effort. I could’ve used at times more help from her—very direct help— rather than, “What do you think?” There were a couple times when we went back and forth—it’s amazing—where she’d say, “Well, what do you think?” after I asked for help; and I’d say, “I don’t know, what do you think?” And she would—very straight-faced—come back with, “Well, what do you think?” And I’d say, “Look, H., I really thought about it very hard; and I can’t come up with anything else. That’s why I’m asking you.” (Herrick 1977:154–55)

4. Acknowledge and Use What the Worker Already Knows and Can Do This technique decreases anxiety because it indicates to work- ers that they can draw on what they already know to meet the demands of supervision. Affirmation and use of the already-rich learn- ing the worker brings to the teaching-learning situation is an advantageous aspect of adult education.

5. Move from the Familiar to the Unfamiliar The unfamiliar provokes anxiety. If the supervi- sor can relate new material to familiar material, the new learning seems less strange and less dif- ficult to learn.

6. Demonstrate Confidence (If Warranted) in the Worker’s Ability to Learn Workers may have doubts about their abilities—doubts against which they need to defend themselves at some expenditure of psychic energy robbed from learning. Communication of a feeling of confidence in the worker’s ability, where war- ranted, helps to allay feelings that detract from learning. Confidence in the learner’s ability to learn is contagious. Communication of confi- dence increases motivation for, and interest in, learning.

At the same time, the supervisor has to accept, and make allowances for, the fact that learning is a growth process and takes time. One must expect nonproductive plateaus where little progress is being made. There needs to be time for reflection, absorption, and consolidation of learning. There is likely to be some regression in learning—much zigging and zagging. Like all growth processes, it is uneven and variable, and different kinds of content are learned at differ- ent rates of speed.

7. Know Your Content; Be Ready and Will- ing to Teach It The supervisor needs not only the wish but also the ability to be helpful. The worker does not know what he or she needs to know, which makes the worker anxious. The worker’s anxiety is tempered, however, by

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she cannot trust the supervisor’s judgment. It is therefore important to commend only what can be defended as objectively praiseworthy. The supervisor should be specific about the behavior that has elicited approval—not using a general statement such as, “You really indi- cated your understanding of Mr. P.’s behavior,” but rather a specific statement such as, “You really indicated your understanding of Mr. P.’s behavior when you said . . . in response to his comment about. . . .” Such specificity not only ensures that learning is attended by positive sat- isfactions because it is being rewarded but also makes conscious and explicit the behavior that the supervisor hopes to reinforce.

Pleasure and pain—reward and punishment— overlap with the question of motivation in learning. People are motivated to learn so that they can avoid the pain that comes from an inability to deal successfully with problems in job performance. They are motivated to learn so as to feel the pleasure of doing a job compe- tently and effectively, to avoid the punishment of being dependent, and to obtain the reward of acting autonomously. People are motivated to learn so that they can avoid the pain of criti- cism and guilt and be rewarded with praise and approbation from themselves and from “significant others,” including the supervisor. People are motivated to learn to avoid the dis- satisfaction that comes from the uncertainty of not clearly knowing what they are supposed to be doing or how to do it. Also, people are moti- vated to learn in order to feel the satisfaction in the security that comes from knowing, with assurance, what it is all about.

3. Praise Through Positive Feedback Such reinforcement is most effective if offered while the learning situation to which it applies is still fresh and vivid. This fact emphasizes the importance of regularly scheduled conferences at reasonably frequent intervals (once a week perhaps) so that the supervisor can offer his critical reaction to recently encountered expe- riences in which learning has been applied by

Principle 3: People Learn Best When Learning Is Successful and Rewarding These techniques help the worker repeat what is satisfying and avoid repeating what is painful.

1. Balance the Skills of the Worker and the Challenges of Practice Set conditions of learn- ing so as to ensure a high probability of success by optimizing the balance between the skills of the worker and the challenges of practice (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988). Intrinsically rewarding each successful experi- ence in one’s practice reinforces the behavior associated with the successful experience.

It would be inadvisable to present the worker with a learning demand that is clearly beyond his or her capacity to meet. If there is little chance of success, there is little motivation to try. Learners needs some assurance that they can succeed if they are going to risk trying. On the other hand, the task needs to be sufficiently challenging to engage the worker’s interest and prompt the worker to extend himself or herself. If a task is too easy, one is not likely to experi- ence a feeling of success in achieving it. Select- ing a learning task that is challenging but not overwhelming is a neat trick. It is, admittedly, much easier to describe than to do—particu- larly without any gauge by which to measure how much challenge a worker can hope to meet successfully.

2. Praise Professional Accomplishments Supervisors can increase positive satisfactions in learning if they praise, where warranted, success in professional accomplishment. Praise is a psychic reward that reinforces the behavior that prompted the commendation. Indiscriminate praise is counterproductive, however. The supervisee is an adult capable of independent critical assessment of his or her own performance. If the supervisor praises a performance that he or she recognizes as sub- standard, the supervisor loses credibility in the worker’s eyes and subsequent assessments are discounted. The worker might feel that he or

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social-work learning situations. The client who is motivated to use the service, has good ego strength, is not unduly defensive, and with whom the worker can in some way identify presents less difficulty. A situation in which cause-and-effect relationships are clear, for which remedial resources and services are available, and in which the problem is well focused presents less difficulty. These charac- teristics represent treatable clients in treatable situations, ensuring greater probability of the successful application of learning.

7. Prepare the Learner for Failure The super- visor can ensure the greater probability of posi- tive satisfaction in learning if he or she prepares the worker for failure. It may be necessary to expose the worker to situations of a complex- ity and difficulty for which he or she is not yet fully prepared. The demands of case coverage may not always permit the assignment of cases that are within the worker’s competence. In such instances, it would be helpful to explicitly recognize with the worker the possibility of fail- ure in the encounter. The worker is then less likely to be overwhelmed by personal guilt or shame and be more open to learning from the experience.

Principle 4: People Learn Best if They Are Actively Involved in the Learning Process

1. Encourage the Worker’s Participation in Agenda Planning The supervisee should be encouraged to participate in planning the agenda for the supervisory sessions. This tech- nique ensures the supervisee’s active involve- ment in the learning situation. In addition, it increases the probability that content of pri- mary interest and concern to the supervisee will be discussed.

Active participation in selecting the content for learning tends to heighten commitment to the task of learning; the learner himself or her- self suggested that he or she was motivated to learn the content. The objectives of the learn- ing-teaching encounter are therefore probably

the supervisees. Assessment of results is neces- sary if the learner is to experience a feeling of success, which is a reward.

4. Evaluate Progress Over Time Periodic stock-taking provided in a formal evaluation conference at less frequent intervals (e.g., every six months) further ensures learning attended by positive satisfaction because it permits a per- spective on long-range progress. The supervisee can get some sense of progress in learning over time, which is rewarding.

5. Partialize Learning The supervisor can ensure a greater probability of success by par- tializing learning: “A man can eat a whole steer, one steak at a time.” Offer learning in digestible dosages. The agenda for a particular conference should cover a limited, defined unit of learning that is clear, acceptable, and attainable.

6. Present Material in a Graded Sequence Success and positive satisfactions in learning are more likely if the material is presented in a graded sequence—from the simple to the complex, from the obvious to the obscure. It involves moving from more concrete consider- ation of case material to more theoretical con- ceptualizations of cases.

It is easier for a worker to understand con- crete situational needs, such as a home for a totally dependent, abandoned infant, than it is to understand the psychological dependency needs of a middle-aged neurotic. It is easier to understand that feelings are facts than to grasp the idea of ambivalence. Grading the complex- ity of content is more difficult in social work than in mathematics or chemistry. Seemingly simple situations have a tendency to present unanticipated complexities. However, to the extent that the supervisor can discern the mea- sure of comparative difficulty of material to be taught, he or she should attempt to teach the simpler content first.

There are some general criteria for differ- entiating between simpler and more difficult

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by doing. Learning determines action, but suc- cessful action reinforces learning.

The worker may, however, engage in incom- petent practice. Consequently, providing prac- tice experience has to be followed by a critical review of what was done. Such feedback enables the worker to know specifically what might need correction and change. This review should again be followed by the opportunity to practice the corrected learning.

Principle 5: People Learn Best if the Content Is Meaningfully Presented

1. Select Content That Interests the Learner As much as possible, select for teaching the con- tent that is of interest and concern to the super- visee. Readiness for learning is often related to some specific situation. Workers need to know what will help them to deal with problems they are having with a particular client. This is the teachable moment for the presentation of the relevant content. At this point, the content has meaning for the supervisee and can be most effectively taught.

2. Present Content Within a Theoretical Framework Content is meaningfully pre- sented if it fits into some general theoretical framework. Notwithstanding the important and growing emphasis on evidence-based practice (Howard et al. 2009; Morago 2010) and supervision (Stoltenberg and Pace 2008; Milne 2009), different supervisors adhere to different theoretical systems, such as psychodynamic psychology, cognitive-behaviorism, and exis- tential psychology (Calley 2008). Barring a pre- ponderance of evidence, the choice of system may not be as important as the fact that there is belief in some comprehensive, internally con- sistent configuration that satisfactorily explains the mysteries of human behavior—at least for its adherents (Frank and Frank 2003). In social work, the subject matter is people. Workers need some cognitive map—some cosmology— that makes sense of why people do what they do in the way they do it.

acceptable to the worker. However, although the supervisor might need to start where the worker is, the supervisor has an obligation to educate toward where the agency wants the worker to be. There are objective performance standards that need to be met. The supervi- sor cannot, in a gesture of mutual egalitarian- ism, give priority to the worker’s educational choices. Supervisors are constrained to teach what the worker needs to learn, not what the worker wants to learn. But the two are often reconcilable, and knowing what the individual learner is interested in learning may enable the supervisor to bring “wants” and “needs” closer to each other.

2. Encourage Discussion The supervisor can ensure greater active involvement of the supervisee in learning by encouraging and providing opportunity for the worker to ques- tion, discuss, object, and express doubt. The supervisor should supplement, rather than substitute for, a supervisee’s thinking. Think- ing is trial acting. The worker will use what is being taught in active encounters with clients. They worker can, however, also be encour- aged to engage with the content to be learned through discussion. This is a cognitive rather than behavioral engagement with the learning but one that nevertheless requires active par- ticipation in learning. Such involvement of the supervisee is only possible in an atmosphere of psychological safety in which the supervisee feels comfortable about questioning the super- visor and presenting his or her own, perhaps opposing, point of view.

3. Provide Opportunities to Use Knowledge The supervisor should provide the explicit opportunity to use and apply the knowledge he or she seeks to teach. If supervisors are teaching the worker some of the principles of client advo- cacy, they would need to provide an assignment that involves the worker in client advocacy. The worker then, of necessity, is actively engaged in testing the learning through use. People learn

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that teach the same idea in different ways, the idea is easier to grasp and accept. Through comparison and contrast—an illustration of similarities and differences—the same content is more meaningfully presented.

Practice of skills is, after all, the opportunity to repeatedly exercise of such skills in different situations. However, this repetition is not hap- hazard. It is carefully selected in terms of orga- nizing principles. As Tyler (1971:83) stated, “In order for educational experiences to produce a cumulative effect they must be organized so as to reinforce each other.” The best rep- etition involves not sheer drill of old learning but some variation that includes new elements to capture the learner’s interest. People learn best if the material is presented in a way that is novel, varied, and challenging. Such presenta- tions tend to keep the learner stimulated and interested.

5. Plan Your Teaching Teaching that is planned in terms of continuity (reiteration of important content—deepening learning), sequence (successively building toward greater complexity—broadening learning), and inte- gration (relating different kinds of content to each other) is apt to be teaching presented in a more meaningful context. Content has to be thoughtfully organized and systematically pre- sented if it is to be taught effectively.

Some of the techniques mentioned in rela- tion to previously cited principles of learning are applicable here as well. The content is more meaningful if the supervisor can relate new learning to previously acquired learning, mov- ing from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and if the content can be presented in logical progres- sions, moving from simple to complex.

6. Make Learning Conscious and Explicit Learning is more meaningful if it can be made conscious and explicit. People are not always aware of what they have learned. To the extent that they can consciously articulate and label what they have learned, the learning is apt to

It is difficult to learn discrete, unrelated details of behavior. If, however, the supervisor is knowledgeable about some well-articulated scheme, he or she can relate details to princi- ples that act as an organizing focus for details. Whatever one’s opinion is regarding id-ego- superego or drive-stimulus-response, one needs to recognize that these ideas suggest large-scale, coherent, explanatory frameworks of human behavior that meaningfully organize details regarding the human condition. The supervi- sor needs to have available some reasonably comprehensive explanatory framework that meaningfully organizes the content that he or she is attempting to teach. Such ideational scaf- folding provides the unity behind the plurality of experiences and gives a sense of connected- ness to discrete lessons.

Bruner (1963) noted that “perhaps the most basic thing that can be said about human memory after a century of intensive research is that unless detail is placed into a structured pattern it is rapidly forgotten” (24); “organiz- ing facts in terms of principle and idea from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory” (31). Bruner further commented that “the principal problem of human memory is not storage but retrieval” and that “the key to retrieval is organization” (32). People learn best if they can organize discrete data in terms of some unifying concepts and some unifying the- oretical framework. An ideational framework helps to organize the chaos of unfamiliar and seemingly unrelated data.

3. Teach Selectively Meaningful teaching is selective teaching. Some things are more impor- tant than others. Some content requires more attention, emphasis, or repetition than other content. The supervisor needs to have priorities that guide the choice of content to be taught.

4. Use Imaginative Repetition Imaginative repetition makes learning more meaningful. If the supervisor selects a number of experiences

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2007). Adult learners are, of course, often able to articulate what they want to learn and why they want to learn it. Maximum participation of the learner in the teacher-learner interaction is not only desirable but eminently feasible. The adult learner has a fund of learning and life experience that might be adapted to the cur- rent learning situation.

As in many professions (Polanyi 1966), much of what the social worker needs to learn is expe- riential in nature. In an analysis of the expe- riential learning patterns of social workers as compared with other professional groups, Kolb (1981) identified the social worker’s learning orientation as “concrete-active.” The pattern suggests a preference for learning through active involvement rather than detached, reflective, analytic observation of phenomena, learning through immersion in experience, a tendency to solve problems in an intuitive trial-and-error manner: “The dominant phi- losophy is pragmatism and truth as defined by workability. Inquiry centers on the question of how actions shape events. The case study is the common method of inquiry and analysis” (Kolb 1981:244).

Kolb’s diagnostic methods have attracted attention in social work education (Ander- son and Adams 1992; Cartney 2000; Kruzich et al.1986; Raschick, Maypole, and Day 1998; Tsang 1993; Van Soest and Kruzich1994; Wolfs- feld and Haj-Yahia 2010) and practice (Fox and Guild 1987), leading Ing (1990) to encourage their use to guide supervision. Although Kolb’s research has been challenged (Koob and Funk 2002) and there may not be “adequate evi- dence base to justify incorporating learning style assessments” of adult learners (Pashler et al. 2008:105), some findings suggest that social workers with varied styles of learning tend to shift (Tsang 1993) and converge over time (Wolfsfeld and Haj-Yahia 2010), adapting to the demands of their job (Gypen 1981). Thus, where Fox and Guild (1987) and Raschick et al. (1998:65) have encouraged supervisors to use learning style assessments to “start

be more meaningful and transferable. This fact calls attention to the need for periodic recapitu- lation and summarization of units of completed learning.

Principle 6: People Learn Best If the Supervisor Takes into Consideration the Supervisee’s Uniqueness as a Learner

1. Individualize the Learner Using Educational Diagnosis Educational diagnosis involves a precise definition of the knowledge and skills that a particular worker needs in order to do the specific tasks required of him or her at a level of proficiency that meets agency standards, as well as how the worker might best learn this. The supervisor should study the learner to under- stand how he or she learns (Ladany, Marotta, and Muse-Burke 2001).

Educational diagnosis of a supervisee includes a statement regarding what the worker already knows well, what he or she needs to learn, what he or she wants to learn, and how he or she wants to learn it. To individualize teaching, the supervisor needs to know not only where the worker is but where he or she wants to go. With such an educational diagnosis, the supervisor is in a better position to fit the learning situation to the learner rather than the learner to the learning situation. The advantage of tutorial teaching in the supervisory context is precisely that the supervisor can tailor the choice of approach and content to the learning needs of the individual supervisee (Memmott and Brennan 1998).

In making an educational diagnosis of supervisees, one needs to consider the special attributes of the adult learner (Cartney 2000; Tusting and Barton 2003). Adult learners have a long attention span, can sustain learning activ- ity, and can postpone gratification for long peri- ods. A good deal of adult learning might more properly be termed relearning rather than pri- mary learning, and the learning process there- fore involves some necessary unlearning. There is more resistance to accepting the temporary dependency that learning often requires (Nye

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and some are ready to learn but are less ready to be taught.

Is resistance to learning (Itzhaky and Aloni 1996) manifested in submissiveness, detach- ment, arrogance, aggression, self-deprecation, dependence, and ingratiation? What failures in performance are due to ignorance or inexperi- ence, amenable to change through education and experience, and what problems are the results of personality difficulties? What charac- ter defects impede learning and tie up psychic energy that might otherwise be available for learning? Is content learned for self-protection or for mastery of problem situations? Is learn- ing collected as a possession or acquired for the aggrandizement of status? Does the supervisee think his or her way through a problem or feel his way through it? Is the supervisee responsive to a deductive pattern of instruction, moving from the general idea to the particular situa- tion, or does the supervisee learn more read- ily inductively, requiring an experience with a series of similar situations before he or she can truly grasp the relevant generalization? Is the supervisee a fast learner, always ready and anxious for new material, or a learner who needs to take more time in integrating learn- ing? Does the supervisee acknowledge his or her learning deficiencies and demonstrate a readiness to learn, or is the response charac- terized by denial and defensiveness? To what extent is the supervisee ready, willing, and able to take responsibility for his or her own learn- ing needs? To what extent is the learner com- fortable with uncertainty and ambiguity in the knowledge base available? To what extent does the supervisee need the certainty of unequivo- cal answers? The marginal learner needs to be distinguished from the resistant learner and the neurotically resistant learner from the situ- ationally resistant learner.

How can the worker be described in terms of the variety of motives that energize people’s interest and behavior? In McClelland and Burnham’s (1976) terms, is the worker moti- vated by a need for interpersonal affiliation,

where the worker is,” Wolfsfeld and Haj-Yahia (2010:68) have found that most supervisors “exhibit [learning] styles congruent with the styles typically found among social workers” and “supervisors tend to stick to their ‘natural’ supervision style irregardless [sic] of the learn- ing style of the specific supervisee.” Research has not identified a significant relationship between the learning-style match between supervisors and supervisees and subordinate satisfaction with supervision (Jacquot 1988) or performance (Epstein 1996). Apparently, some degree of contrast or tension between the teaching style of the supervisor and the learn- ing style of the supervisee is beneficial (Tsang 1993), and those supervisors who do adjust their style to their supervisees “seem to prefer some degree of difference—but not too much” (Wolfsfeld and Haj-Yahia 2010:86). It appears that social workers and their supervisors tend to prefer a person-oriented supervisory style, characterized by “mutual communication, sup- port, and emotional expression” (Itzhaky and Eliahu 1999:77).

The educational diagnosis of the individual adult learner is developed through supervisory interaction and assessment. The supervisor observes the supervisee’s use of supervision, the level of motivation manifested, the balance of rigidity and flexibility in learning, the level of preparation for and participation in con- ferences, and the general attitude toward the content to be learned and toward the learning situation. The supervisor attempts to discern the procedures that elicit the supervisee’s best response. Some people learn best in a highly structured situation; some people learn best in a loosely structured situation; some learn through listening, others through reading; some learn only through action in a practice situation; some cannot begin to act until they have learned; some learn best in an individual tutorial situation; others learn best through group interaction; some learn best through ready acceptance of teaching; some learn best through active opposition to content presented;

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difficulty, the supervisor needs to be aware of some relevant symptomatic manifestations. The consistent failure on the part of the worker to discuss content that might logically be pre- sumed to be important is a diagnostic one. The total absence of any mention of the husband- father in the case of a child with a behavior problem, or lack of any information regarding sexual adjustment in the case of a marital prob- lem, might be suggestive.

An atypically sharp, disproportionate feeling reaction to some aspect of the client’s situation might be another cue. The worker’s response, if exaggerated, might suggest that the source of the reaction is only partially the client’s situa- tion and more due to the worker’s own prob- lems. Persistent stereotyping of the client based on limited evidence might suggest distortions in perception stemming from the worker.

Individualization implies some understand- ing of what the learner risks in learning this content, and there are both internal risks and external risks. The internal risks relate to the meaning this learning has for the worker’s self- image and current belief and attitudinal system. The external risks concern the worker’s rela- tionship with his or her reference group. Those who believe that the Bible is literal truth, for instance, may not accept proof in support of the theory of evolution. The conservative worker might feel out of place with friends if he or she accepted liberal ideas about social welfare.

2. Apply the Educational Diagnosis The supervisor, in preparation for a conference, would need to review what the supervisee most needs to learn at this particular time, how best to approach teaching the content to this par- ticular supervisee, how the supervisee is likely to react in response to the efforts to teach this content, and so on.

Individualization implies that each person has his or her own unique, best way of learn- ing. However, although it is recognized that the supervisor may not always be capable of modu- lating an approach to be neatly congruent with

for task achievement, or for power to influ- ence others? In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow 1943), is the worker motivated by a strong need for belonging, love, and social interaction, by a need for esteem and status, or by a need for self-actualization? In Herzberg’s terms (Herzberg et al. 2005), is the worker motivated by maintenance needs, job security, salary, and working conditions, or by needs for growth and development, increased respon- sibility, and recognition of accomplishment? What is the degree of cognitive complexity with which the worker approaches a situation—the extent to which he or she can perceive the mul- tidimensional aspects of a problem?

A comprehensive educational diagnosis that individualizes the supervisee also includes some attention to learning problems associated with more personal aspects of the supervisee’s functioning in interaction with the clients, such as learning problems relating to the reactivation of the worker’s personal developmental prob- lems in the interaction with the client and prob- lems of selective identification with one aspect of the case situation. As a result of transference, the worker’s perception of the client is distorted by seeing the client as representing significant others from the worker’s past in some measure. As a result of reactivation of developmental problems, the worker may distort the client’s situation by avoidance of significant content that would be important to recognize. As a result of selective identification, the worker may distort perception of the client’s situation by “taking sides” with the child in a parent-child problem or with the wife in a marital problem. There are also difficulties that result not only from developmental problems but maturational problems—problems posed for the worker in moving from one state of life to another, from single to married, from nonparent to parent, from midlife crisis to retirement.

An educational diagnosis requires some attention to these sources of distortion that can adversely affect the worker’s ability to offer effective service. In the effort to identify such

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as having crucial significance for learning in supervision. The term relationship as used here includes the strength of the working alliance between teacher and learner (Efstation, Patton, and Kardash 1990; Horvath and Greenberg 1989), the quality of their emotional interac- tion (Kaib 2010), and the strength and resil- ience of their bond (Fitch, Pistole, and Gunn 2010; Renfro-Michel and Sheperis 2009). A growing body of evidence suggests that inter- personal relationships have a potent effect on the neurobiology of learning throughout life (Latawiec 2008; Cozolino 2010). In a review of the research, Lambert (2001) described the interpersonal relationship as the most powerful helping ingredient determining psychotherapy outcomes (Lambert 2001).

Learning takes place best when student and teacher are both in concert and at ease with the lessons to be learned and their respective duties, obligations, and tasks (Tsong 2004). Not only must the learner be motivated to accept the content of what needs to be learned, but he or she must be motivated and ready to accept it from the teacher. A worker resists accepting content offered by a supervisor he or she does not like, trust, and respect. The relationship, if positive, is the bridge over which the material passes from teacher to learner. If the relation- ship is negative, communication is blocked.

A positive relationship intensifies the impact of the supervisor’s educational efforts. There is considerable empirical support for the conten- tion that the nature of the supervisory relation- ship is a powerful variable in determining the supervisee’s openness and receptivity to the supervisor’s efforts to educate toward change (Bernard and Goodyear 2009). Relationship propels learning and makes content acceptable.

Identification with the supervisor heightens the worker’s motivation to learn. As a conse- quence of identification, the worker wishes to be like the supervisor, to have the supervisor’s competence, and to learn in order to emulate the supervisor. Only if the relationship is posi- tive will the worker identify with the supervisor.

the needs of the learner, the supervisor should at least be understandingly aware of the nature of the learner’s educational diagnosis.

3. Actively Engage the Learner in Assessment It is desirable to actively engage the supervisee in an assessment of what he or she already knows and wants to learn. Once again, this individ- ualizes the learning needs of the particular supervisee, spares him or her the boredom of redundant learning, and spares the supervisor the effort of teaching what does not need to be taught. In addition, the learner’s employment record and record of experience at the agency give relevant information about his or her edu- cational and experiential background.

Adult learners have at their command a variety of previously learned skills that may be retranslated for use in a social work context. When implementing educational supervision, the supervisor might try to help the supervisee identify these skills and help the supervisee to use them appropriately.

4. Consider the Worker’s Pace of Learning The supervisor should individualize teaching according to differences in the pace of learning. It takes time to integrate newly learned mate- rial, assimilate it with previous learning, and make an accommodation to a new equilibrium in thinking and feeling that the incorporation of learned material requires. Being asked to absorb too much too quickly threatens internal coherence and stability.

Although it is true that people learn more effectively when they learn at their own pace, there needs to be some recognition that both the agency and clients pay a heavy price for the pace of the slow learner. Neither can tolerate for long an excessively slow learner.

The Significance of the Supervisor- Supervisee relationship for Educational Supervision Throughout this chapter, we have made allu- sions to the supervisor-supervisee relationship

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process in educational supervision, the worker is then in a better position to understand what is involved in seeking and using help. As Rob- inson stated, “Since supervision in social case- work teaches a helping process, it must itself be a helping process so that the [worker] experi- ences in his relationship with the supervisor a process similar to the one he must learn to use with his client” (1949:30).

Just as change can be awkward or painful for clients, the “deeper” lessons of professional development are “typically associated” with epi- sodes of personal discomfort and subjective dis- tress for the worker as well (Lombardo, Milne and Proctor 2009:213). Therefore, supervisors and supervisees, as well as workers and clients, must work to monitor, nurture, and tend the bonds that ally them (Falender and Shafranske 2004; Gard and Lewis 2008), if they are to repair the ruptures that invariably occur in otherwise- healthy working relationships (Bordin 1983). A rupture is “a problematic emotional response which interferes with intellectual functioning” that “arises out of the universal lag between intellectual grasp and ability to perform until the individual integrates knowledge through experience” (Burns 1958:7). Thus, the supervi- sory relationship itself, its nature and use, is an educational exemplification of what needs to be taught in developing clinical competence. The supervisory relationship is both the context for learning and a learning experience in itself.

Since Ekstein and Wallerstein (1972) emphasized the importance of the supervi- sory relationship, it has become the subject of considerable interest to researchers. Although empirical evidence “affirming the importance of the supervisory alliance . . . is surprisingly wanting (Milne 2009:93), some evidence sug- gests that the supervisory relationship affects both the process (Inman and Ladany 2008) and the outcomes of supervision (Bernard and Goodyear 2009), including client outcomes (Harkness 1997; Shulman 2010). Such findings highlight the importance of research that seeks to identify additional factors and variables that

The supervisor as model for identification is aptly described in the following, written by a supervisee:

I guess his personal way of being was very strong in supervision. It was very warm, very relaxed, very comfortable—he smiled, laughed, sat back in his chair, and then gazed away as he listened. He was very interested but wasn’t like sitting on the edge of his chair waiting for the next thing I would say so that he could respond to that. And I perceived that as indirectly giving me a model ‘cause I figured that must be in some ways what he’s like in therapy; and that’s more what I would be like in therapy if I were myself. And it would also kinda make the client a lot more comfort- able since it made me comfortable in supervision. “Aha!” I figured. “I should try to do that.” It’s very relaxing, and he uses strokes—makes a support- ive, reinforcing comments, but not overbearingly so—just does enough of that that I can believe it when he does it. And he never makes harsh, criti- cal statements and his suggestions are usually spe- cific, and he explains what he means by them and gives an example of it but somehow manages to do that without making me feel like a jerk for not having known to do that in the first place. (Her- rick 1977:139–40)

In learning through identification, the super- visor needs to give the supervisee the freedom to accept what he or she can use and reject or discard what does not seem appropriate. Such freedom leads to selective identification and selective learning rather than an indiscriminate mimicry of the supervisor.

The educational alliance between supervi- sor and supervisee is analogous, in significance and importance, to the therapeutic alliance between worker and client. Establishing and maintaining a positive relationship with the supervisee teaches essential social work skills. In developing such a relationship, the supervi- sor is modeling the way in which the supervisee might effectively relate to the client (Bogo 1993; Shulman 2010). Having experienced a helping

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of previously developed solutions to practice problems. Studies of student evaluation of teaching show that a thorough knowledge of subject matter content is a necessary, if not suf- ficient, requirement for good teaching.

In fact, in response to a question designed to identify their principal “strengths” in supervi- sion, supervisors most frequently cited clinical knowledge, skill, and experience. Listing their greatest strengths, supervisors said the follow- ing (Kadushin 1992b):

•  I have extensive knowledge and experi- ence and am able to use that in developing skills in my supervisees.

•  Experience and firsthand knowledge of the services I am supervising.

•  Knowledge about what skills are needed to do the job and ability to impart that knowledge.

•  My knowledge of public social service from budgeting to therapeutics.

Many supervisees, responding to an analo- gous question about their perceptions of their supervisors’ strengths, cited clinical exper- tise. Supervisees said the following (Kadushin 1992b):

•  One of her principal strengths lies in her knowledge of theory and in her willing- ness to share this knowledge.

•  Expert clinical knowledge which allows him to offer suggestions.

•  Excellent knowledge he has of the theory, applied theory, agency dynamics and case work.

In addition to the demand for practice exper- tise, there are additional problems in imple- menting educational supervision. Supervisors may exploit educational supervision to meet their own needs without being fully aware of it. The situation provides the opportunity for developing protégés, for making workers over into the supervisor’s own professional image.

influence the development and quality of the supervisory relationship (Jacobsen and Tang- gaard 2009). This includes individual and developmental differences among supervis- ees and their supervisors on such dimensions as anxiety, attachment style, cognitive com- plexity and development, ego development, ethnicity and culture, experience, gender, learning and cognitive styles, personality, power, race, self-efficacy and self-presentation (of anxiety, interpersonal attachment, and self-monitoring), and sexual and theoretical orientation. Lyon and Potkar (2010) provided a succinct review of the research and, for an extended discussion, Bernard and Goodyear (2009) devoted three chapters to this literature.

The Supervisor’s problems in Implementing Educational Supervision To teach the content that is the curriculum of educational supervision, the supervisor needs to know the content. There is a growing demand for evidence-based practice, and stay- ing current with the rapid proliferation of evi- dence-based knowledge is demanding. Practice knowledge and competence are indispensable for effective first-line supervision generally, and for educational supervision in particular. These fuel the power of expertise, a principal source of the supervisor’s administrative authority. The responsibilities of educational supervision fur- ther require a solid grasp of the subject matter relevant to agency practice. The supervisor—as a source of identification, an admired practitio- ner, and a model of effective practice—needs to project the image and the reality of competence. Consequently, the supervisor faces the problem of assessing—and if necessary, upgrading—the- oretical knowledge and expertise.

Scott (1969) found that professionally ori- ented workers preferred a supervisor “to know the theoretical fundamentals of their discipline—be skilled in teaching casework methods and capable of offering professionally competent assistance” (94–95). The supervisee looks to the supervisor to have available a fund

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A supervisor who is anxious about his or her own relationship with the administrator may overcontrol the worker to prevent embarrass- ment at worker errors for which the supervisor is held responsible. Conversely, supervisors may act out their own rebellious impulses toward the agency through their supervisees, from the safety of middle-management positions.

The supervisor who has considerable thera- peutic skills but limited pedagogic skills, or who feels more comfortable with the role of cli- nician than that of teacher, may convert educa- tional supervision into psychotherapy. There is greater gratification in casting the supervisee in the role of client than in that of learner. Ques- tions brought into the supervisory conference by the supervisee tend to become personalized and interpreted as problems of personal pathol- ogy with which the supervisee might need help.

Supervisors may be sufficiently uncertain about their own knowledge that they cannot permit the supervisee the freedom to experi- ment and to learn. A supervisor wrote:

Because of my discomfort with the supervisory relationship, I found it easier to simply introduce final decisions matter-of-factly, rather than risk challenge of my own choice of alternatives in a give- and-take process. I was perfectly happy with this “dictator” method but feared an open exercise of authority which might be called for in joint demo- cratic decision-making if the worker didn’t accept my reasons as valid and challenged my choices.

Such a supervisor may tend to be defensive and find it difficult to acknowledge ignorance.

Educational supervision provides the oppor- tunity for a narcissistic display of knowledge and skills. Whether or not this is educationally helpful to the supervisee becomes a secondary consideration. The supervisor who made the following comment caught himself indulging in such behavior:

In discussing the client with the worker during that session, I made another mistake: that of “lecturing”

The supervisor becomes, in such instances, more an object of direct imitation than an object of identification. The worker’s success is the supervisor’s success; the worker’s failures are perceived as the supervisor’s failures. The supervisee is less an independent entity than an extension of the supervisor.

The supervisor who, in response to the triadic situation of client-worker-supervisor, is still more a worker than a supervisor, may focus too heavily on the client. Such a supervisor is still primarily interested in practice, albeit vicari- ously through the supervisee. This supervisor has not yet made the psychological transition from worker to supervisor. The consequence for educational supervision is that the supervi- sor denies the supervisee his or her freedom to learn. Giving exclusive priority to client needs, the supervisor is so fearful of mistakes by the supervisee that he or she tends to be overdirec- tive and overcontrolling. The supervisor acts more like a guard than a guide.

A supervisor may be hesitant to share his or her knowledge and expertise with the super- visee out of anxiety about competition, from a “sibling.” If the supervisor derives gratification from the supervisee’s dependency, he or she will perennially tend to perceive the supervisee as “not yet ready” for the next steps in education. In both these situations, the supervisor tends to teach the content of educational supervision grudgingly, in small doses, at an inappropri- ately slow tempo. Evidence of workers’ growing independence and competence is viewed with anxiety rather than pleasure. An imperious “need to be needed” on the part of the supervi- sor will further conflict with the responsibility to grant the supervisee as much autonomy as he or she can responsibly handle.

Overidentification with the worker may make the supervisor overly protective, shield- ing the worker from possible mistakes, anx- ious that the worker may not be able to accept normal failures: “She was afraid to take the risks necessary for learning and I was afraid to let her.”

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evaluating whether or not the supervisee has in fact learned what it is that the supervisee has to know and what the supervisor is mandated to teach. These considerations make it clear once again that supervisor and supervisee are not acting as equals in educational supervision.

Every supervisor has his or her own likes and dislikes regarding supervisee learning patterns. If the supervisor is not aware of such predilec- tions, there is less probability that he or she can control differences in response to different supervisees. Some supervisors like rapid, avid learners who absorb teaching quickly and vora- ciously; some like the slow, plodding learners who are less challenging and for whom consid- erable repetition of content is required. Some supervisors like the supervisee who presses the supervisor-supervisee educational relation- ship in the direction of peer consultation and colleagueship; others find gratification in the supervisee who accepts a parent-child rela- tionship. Some like the exuberant, extroverted learner; some like the shy, introverted learner. Some are more comfortable with learners who do best in the individual tutorial situation; some are more comfortable with group-oriented learners.

differentiating Educational Supervision from Therapy One of the persistent problems encountered by educational supervisors is the task of differenti- ating supervision from therapy—differentiating teaching from treating (Ganzer and Ornstein 2004; Kernberg 2010). The supervisory context is in many essential characteristics similar to the therapeutic context. Both situations involve a continuing, intimate, highly cathected, dyadic relationship in which an effort at exerting inter- personal influence to effect change is made by one member of the dyad toward the other (Shulman 2005). Both interactions are designed to develop a heightened sense of self-awareness (Frawley- O’Dea and Sarnet 2001; Rosenfeld 2008).

How then does the supervisor develop self- awareness in the supervisee without being

the worker on the psychological, social, cultural and economic factors affecting clients’ behavioral patterns without any reference to the particu- lar situation at hand. And when I did talk about the client, I started to discourse on the effects of emotional and cultural deprivation on the lives of children, and the psychoanalytical implications of Henry’s father having run away from the home. .  .  . I finally caught myself in the middle of the oedipal complex bit. “B.S.!” I said to myself and changed the subject immediately, hoping that the worker had not realized the pompousness of it all, and if she did, that she would forgive me for it. I then realized how easy it is to get carried away when one has a captive audience. The “teaching” aspect of supervision is an art not easily mastered. I must remember to do more teaching and less preaching.

Some egalitarian-oriented supervisors may, on the other hand, be afraid of showing what they know. Revealing that they are actu- ally more knowledgeable than the supervisee destroys a pretense of equality in the relation- ship. Teaching freely requires the ready accep- tance by the supervisor that he or she does, in fact, know more than the supervisee and is entitled to teach it.

Some supervisors are made uneasy by the inherently unequal nature of the supervisor- supervisee relationship in educational supervision. It needs to be noted that the superordinate-subordinate role relationship still holds, even in the educational component of supervision. The supervisor is sanctioned by the agency to engage in educational activ- ity. Second, the supervisee, while participat- ing in determining what should be taught and learned, faces constraints determined by what the agency requires that he learn to do. Educa- tional supervision needs to maintain a balance between what the supervisees want to learn and what they need to learn. Consequently, the supervisor has considerable responsibility for what is included in the educational pro- gram. Third, the supervisor is responsible for

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is not concerned with the causes of personal pathology, but only with the consequences of such problems for the worker’s performance on the job.

This is not to deny that professional growth does have consequences related to personal growth. The professional self is, after all, a sig- nificant aspect of the total personal-self config- uration. However, if the personal self undergoes growth and change, as is likely, this happens as an incidental, serendipitous, unplanned, unin- tended byproduct of the focus on professional growth.

Although the following comments by Ekstein and Wallerstein (1972) relate to supervision of the psychiatric resident, they are pertinent to this discussion:

Both supervision and psychotherapy are inter- personal helping processes working with the same affective components, with the essential difference between them created by the differ- ence in purpose. Though both are helping pro- cesses, the purpose of the helping experience is different. Whatever practical problems the patient may bring to his psychotherapist, they are always viewed in the light of the main task: the resolution of inner conflict. Whatever personal problems the student may bring to his supervisor, they are like- wise always seen in terms of the main task: lead- ing him toward greater skill in his work with his patients. . . . If the main purpose of a relationship is maintained throughout, the difference is clearly apparent between the type of relationship called psychotherapy and the one called supervision. . . . In psychotherapy the patient essentially sets his own goals. The therapist has no vested interest in any particular degree or direction of change. In supervision, on the other hand, the clinical set- ting, whose representative is the supervisor, sets both its requirements and its goals in terms of standards of professional performance and clini- cal service currently rendered and to be attained. (Ekstein and Wallerstein 1972:254–55, reprinted with permission of International Universities Press)

accused of “social working the social worker”? A distinction needs to be made between edu- cational supervision and therapy to prevent problems in boundary violations and conflict- ing dual relationships.

Differences Between Supervision and Therapy Differences between educational supervision, concerned with developing self-awareness and therapy, relate to purpose, focus, and roles.

Purpose and Focus The supervisor recognizes and respects the limits and restrictions of his or her purpose. The supervisor’s responsibility is to help the supervisee become a better worker, not necessarily a better person. A legitimate concern is with the professional activities of the supervisee, but the supervisor has no sanction to intrude into the personal life of the super- visee. The concern is with changes in profes- sional identity rather than changes in personal identity. The supervisor should ask, “How can I help you do your work?” rather than “How can I help you?” Ekstein and Wallerstein (1972) noted that “in supervision we aim at a change in skill, a change in the use of the professional self while in psychotherapy we aim at changes which embrace the total adaptive functioning of the individual” (92).

The valid focus of attention is the supervis- ee’s work, rather than the supervisee himself or herself. Only if the supervisee’s behavior, feel- ings, and attitudes create some difficulty in the performance of professional tasks—then and only then—do they become a legitimate matter for supervisory concern. The supervisor is not entitled to intervene with regard to behavior, feelings, and attitudes that, however problem- atic or deviant, are not clearly manifested in some job-related interaction.

In educational supervision, one is not pri- marily dealing with the total person as in ther- apy. The supervisor is dealing with only one of the many roles that make up the worker’s total identity—the specific, particular role of agency employee. The supervisor, unlike the therapist,

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supervisory duty (Campbell 2006; Milne 2009). The supervisor cannot at the same time be a psychotherapist to the supervisee and a guard- ian of agency standards.

In implementing the focus on supervision as against therapy, the supervisor keeps the dis- cussion centered on the client’s situation and experience rather than the worker’s situation and experience. The discussion is work-cen- tered, not worker-centered. Further, the focus is on what the worker did or failed to do rather than why he did it. If there is any discussion of the reasons that may help explain the worker’s behavior, it is centered on the current work situation rather than in any psychodynamic exploration of developmental antecedents.

Current reality as an explanation of work- ers’ problems should always be examined first. Personal problems should be discussed only through their derivative manifestations in assigned work.

Unlike therapy, in supervision problems are alluded to but not explored for their develop- mental genesis. As Towle (1954:89) noted, “Our task is education not therapy. .  . . We should deal with the student’s emotional difficulties only insofar as they are interfering with his learning.” Therapy explores the personal impli- cations of problems; supervision explores the professional implications of problems.

Difference in Role Relationships Shifting from educational supervision to psychotherapy involves an unwarranted and inappropriate shift in roles. As Stiles (1963) said, “A super- visory relationship contains an implicit con- tract: the worker is responsible for attempting to maximize his performance and continuing his professional development; the supervisor is responsible for helping him achieve these goals” (24). The parameters of the contract, as noted, are the worker’s “performance” and “profes- sional development.” Concern with personal development is an unwarranted and unantici- pated extension of the explicit contract. Hav- ing consented to an administrative-educational

The therapist is free to work toward any goal that the client selects. The supervisor is responsible for the behavior of the supervisee and is not free to work toward any goal the supervisee selects. The agency requirement is that the supervisor help the worker become an effective agency employee. The therapist helps the client achieve an individualized, personally satisfactory solution to his problem. The super- visor helps the worker achieve a resolution to his or her problem that is satisfactory to the organization. The objective of the supervision is improved technical performance in contrast with the therapist’s objective of personality reconstruction or remediation. The objectives of educational supervision and therapy are dif- ferent. Supervision is oriented to the needs of the client; therapy is oriented to the needs of the worker.

If the supervisee becomes a client of the supervisor in a shift from educational super- vision to psychotherapy, the focus of supervi- sory attention must shift from the agency client to the worker. The needs of the supervisee as client then take precedence over the needs of the agency client. This is a subversion of the primary responsibility and obligation of the agency toward its client. Instead of the focus of attention being on service, the client is used to advance the therapy of the worker. This is an inequitable manipulation of the client, without the client’s permission and in contravention to the client’s objectives in coming to the agency. The client becomes an involuntary coparticipant in the worker’s therapy.

To accept the supervisee for psychotherapy requires a modification of work standards. The criteria for a decision regarding enforcement of agency standards become the therapeutic needs of the supervisee-client rather than the needs of agency clients. This too is contrary to the primary obligation of the agency. Exer- cise of administrative sanctions required in maintaining adequate standards may be anti- therapeutic for the supervisee-client. The evalu- ation of worker performance is an inalienable

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current functioning than is possible, or accept- able, in the supervisory relationship.

Effective therapy requires a psychosocial diagnosis of the client and a therapeutic alli- ance between therapist and client. Effective educational supervision requires an educa- tional diagnosis and a teacher-learner alliance between supervisor and supervisee. In therapy, unconscious feelings are explored for their gen- esis and worked through for their resolution. In supervision, unconscious feelings may be identified but are neither explored nor resolved. While listening with the understanding of a therapist the supervisor responds, not as a ther- apist but as an educator. Even in psychoanalytic training, the following holds true:

Supervision should not become a psychothera- peutic process: conflating the two usually leads to regression in the supervision, tends to blur the clarity of the supervisory process, and may inter- fere with the collegial aspects of the relationship. It may also foster transference displacement and acting out by a supervisee. . . . (Kernberg 2010:611)

The supervisor seeks to promote identifica- tion, but not transference. If therapy depends for some of its effectiveness on transference ele- ments, then converting the supervisory situa- tion into a therapeutic relationship increases the probability that therapy will fail. In the usual therapy situation, the contact between patient and therapist is confined to their inter- action during the therapy sessions. Supervisor and supervisee, on the contrary, have contact with each other in many different contexts in the agency. This tends to dilute the potency of transference for effective therapy.

The evaluative component inherent in super- vision makes it difficult to effectively engage in therapy. In addition to the risk of loss of self- esteem, of possible rejection and blame in shar- ing intra- and interpersonal problems, there is the added risk that this content might be used in evaluating the supervisee’s potentialities for professional performance and advancement.

process, the worker cannot legitimately have a psychotherapy process imposed on him or her. “Therapizing” the relationship suggests that the supervisor is entering areas of the worker’s life concerning which the supervisor has no orga- nizational sanction or authority.

Unlike the client in psychotherapy, the super- visee did not voluntarily select the supervisor as a therapist and is not free to terminate the rela- tionship with the supervisor (Campbell 2006). Thus, attempted transformation of educational supervision into psychotherapy is even more likely to be resented by the captive worker.

In educational supervision, the worker con- tracts for knowledge and guidance, not the alleviation of symptoms. There is no treatment contract that would sanction the supervisor to subject the supervisee to some of the psychic pain that may be necessary for effective ther- apy. There is no contract that would make the supervisee aware that he or she might have to accept some of the inevitable discomforts of therapy.

In accepting the role of patient to therapist, certain prerogatives of privacy are waived. In a supervisory relationship that is redirected to a therapeutic relationship, there is no clear agreement on the part of the supervisee that he or she has agreed to the suspension of such entitlements.

Subverting educational supervision so that it becomes psychotherapy in disguise not only contravenes the agreed-upon nature of recipro- cal supervisor-supervisee role relations, it also violates the conditions for effective therapy. To the extent that personal therapy potentiates supervision and professional growth (Bike, Norcross, and Schatz 2009; Gold and Hilsen- roth 2009), merging supervision and therapy may weaken them both (Rosenfeld 2007; Latawiec 2008). Effective therapy is not likely to be possible unless a complete detailed his- tory has been taken and a clear diagnosis of the problem formulated (Harkness 2010). Effec- tive therapy would require considerably more detailed exploration of developmental data and

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are similar in some essential respects. Both encourage self-examination in the context of a meaningful relationship; both are directed toward personal growth and change; both provoke anxiety. The psychodynamics of both processes and the techniques employed are the same. The distinction lies primarily in purpose and focus and role parameters of the relationship.

problems in Implementation of Therapy- Educational Supervision distinction One of the problems that all supervisees face is learning what issues to bring to supervision. “[I]n virtually every therapeutic model super- visors expect comprehensive and accurate information about therapy sessions and the trainees internal processing of the case,” (Far- ber 2006:181), yet most supervisees withhold information from their supervisors (Ladany, Hill, Corbett, and Nutt 1996; Farber 2006). Mehr, Ladany, and Caskie (2010:103) asked, “What are they not telling you?” and admon- ished that trainees must “disclose information about their clients and clinical interactions, as well as their own experience within the super- visory relationship . . . [i]n order for supervisors to promote the development of [their] clinical competence.”

On the other hand, there are limits. A vener- able psychoanalyst wrote:

After telling me that her patient had expressed sexual fantasies about her in a clearly seductive way, the candidate—a highly intelligent woman who was usually secure and open—told me that this had made her feel very insecure. We explored this further, and she finally said: “I have to confess that if I met this man one evening in a bar without any prior knowledge of him, I would be tempted to go to bed with him.” (Kernberg 2010:611)

In response, the psychoanalyst continued:

I commented that she was making it clear he was attractive to her as a man, but what was it in him

There is increased tendency to share selectively rather than fully and openly. The responsibili- ties of supervision compromise the require- ments for effective therapeutic interaction.

Yet, in flesh-and-blood practice, the bound- ary between supervision and therapy can become indistinct. In an exploration of that borderline region, Frawley-O’Dea and Sarnat (2001) have argued for a more permeable, inter- subjective approach to supervision in which the power and authority of the supervisor is muted, the distinction between teaching and treat- ing is relaxed, and the unconscious dynamics of both the supervisee and the supervisor are shared and explored (Ganzer and Ornstein 2004; Miehls 2010). Although Frawley-O’Dea and Sarnat (2001) did not view “the supervis- ees’ dynamics as taboo and off limits,” they are not “advocating an anything goes approach, but rather a careful and reflective investigation of the interpersonal world of the participants” with “boundaries and limits . . . negotiated and co-constructed by the participants” (Miehls 2010:372).

Personal factors are frequently addressed in supervision (Henry, Hart, and Nance 2004; Rosenfeld 2007), as clinicians draw on both per- sonal and professional sources in their practice (Falendar and Shafranske 2004). However, in therapizing the supervisor-supervisee relation- ship, the supervisor risks doing the supervisee an injustice. It reduces the supervisee’s incen- tive to get outside help clearly designed to pro- vide therapy and thus denies the supervisee the full benefit of a relationship exclusively devoted to his therapy (Bike, Norcross, and Schatz 2009; Gold and Hilsenroth 2009). And where prac- titioners of “relational” supervision tread in the grey zone, Miehls (2010:372) noted that the needs of the client and the treatment should be the primary focus of supervision, urging cau- tion if the supervisee has not had his or her own treatment.

To summarize, confusion results from the fact that educational supervision toward developing job-related self-awareness and psychotherapy

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responded by doing “nothing.” My quick thoughts leading to this response went something like this: avoid taking on the role of therapist; personal problems of the supervisee are not relevant here unless they interfere with job or learning perfor- mance and there is not yet sufficient evidence to this effect. In starting the process of evaluating Vera’s work, I have become aware of a tendency on her part to shy away from offering help to cli- ents in the area of marital conflict, although not hesitating to offer and provide it in other prob- lem areas (housing, child-parent relationships, etc.). Also, it now occurs to me that Vera may not have been asking for any help with her personal problems (she was already involved in outside counseling), but only for help in resolving her concern about being able to help someone else with a problem she saw was similar to her own. If this was the case, I would consider her concern to represent the kind of emotional aspect of learn- ing which is the responsibility of the supervisor to deal with. In retrospect, viewing the pattern of Vera’s work performance I think the problem was more job related than I had originally thought.

The problem was noted by another supervi- sor in the following vignette:

A recurrent problem was Dick’s hesitancy about helping a family arrange for a nursing home placement for an aged client, even when this seemed clearly necessary. At some point, I felt that it was important to explore Dick’s feelings toward nursing homes to be sure that he wasn’t allowing a personal bias to interfere against nursing home placement. I attempted to deal exclusively with job-related awareness, but when Dick admitted that much of his feeling came from the experi- ence of his own father being placed in a nursing home, the session began to focus more and more on the supervisee rather than on the work-related issue. We became caught up in dealing with the psychology of Dick’s relationship with his father, but eventually I was able to redirect our attention and move back with some difficulty to the issue of nursing homes for his clients.

that made her afraid of him? This led us into a discussion [in which] I expressed appreciation of the candidate’s capacity to talk honestly about her feelings with me, but I focused on the meaning of the patient’s induction of those feelings, and I respected the candidate’s privacy regarding the particular unconscious tendencies that might have made her feel particularly attracted to this man. (Kernberg 2010:611)

Problems such as these “leave the supervi- sor in the dilemma of having to be more than a teacher, but less than a therapist. Inevitably this demands sensitive and difficult decisions on the part of the supervisor, who must always be aware of when his professional concern becomes personal intrusiveness and yet deal directly and realistically with counter-transfer- ence phenomena that interfere with the ongo- ing therapeutic work (Gizynski 1978:203).”

Furthermore, “It is a matter of extreme deli- cacy to maintain a warm and interested human relationship on the one hand and on the other not to respond to the therapeutic needs that the [supervisee] may reveal either directly by the development of symptoms or indirectly in the handling of case material” (Zetzel 1953).

Consequently, establishing guidelines for what is appropriate in a supervisory conference is easier than applying them (Sarnat 1992). The following excerpt is a supervisor’s introspective review of the difficulty in making a decision in such a situation. The problem lies in deciding when a worker’s difficulty is purely personal and when it is task-related:

Vera [the worker] brought up the fact that she was experiencing some confusion herself about the prospect of marrying her present boyfriend and that the two of them were involved in premarital counseling. She expressed doubt as to her ability to help someone else deal with a problem similar to the one she herself was experiencing.

I was caught a little off guard and likewise experienced a certain element of confusion—a few quick thoughts ran through my mind, and I

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acceptance of distinction between Supervision and Therapy: Empirical data The available data suggest that most supervi- sors and supervisees understand, and accept, the limited definition of the supervisor’s responsibility as outlined here. Most of the 853 respondents to a questionnaire made a clear distinction between professional development and personal development. The professional development of the supervisee was selected by both supervisors and supervisees as one major objective of supervision. Conversely, both groups selected “ensuring the more complete development of the supervisee as a mature per- son” as among the three least important objec- tives. Satisfaction “in helping the supervisee grow and develop in professional competence” was the main satisfaction in supervision for the largest percentage of supervisors (88 percent). Less than 1 percent of them, however, checked “helping supervisees with their personal prob- lems” as a source of satisfaction. Similarly, the statement of dissatisfaction in supervision least frequently checked by supervisees was “My supervisor tends to become too involved in my personal problems,” indicating that transfor- mation of supervision into psychotherapy was not currently a problem for most of the respon- dents (Kadushin 1974).

Supervisors responding to admonitions that they have no right to “casework the caseworker” adhere to the dichotomy of professional versus personal development even more rigorously than do supervisees. If anything, supervisees indicate a greater willingness to accept the ther- apeutic intrusion of the supervisor than super- visors appear willing to offer it. In response to the incomplete sentence “If personal problems came up in my work with clients I would pre- fer that my supervisor .  .  .” 48 percent of the supervisees said that they wanted the super- visor to “identify the problems and help me resolve them,” whereas only 30 percent of the supervisors preferred this response. Conversely, 44 percent of the supervisors would “identify the problem and help supervisees get outside

This problem is a difficult one because the worker is likely to react negatively to both indif- ference and excessive interest. If the supervisor ignores the supervisee’s comment about what is apparently a purely personal problem, the worker is likely to feel rejected. If the supervi- sor shows excessive interest in the problem, it can be interpreted as an unwarranted intrusion. Recognition of the worker’s statement without pursuing it might be the difficult response of choice. A frank, explicit statement by the super- visor of what he or she is doing might help: “I appreciate that this must be a difficult problem for you but I really don’t think it is appropriate for us to discuss it at length here.” However, it needs to be recognized that a “rigid boundary between the personal and professional lives of (supervisees) seems simplistic and artificial” (Gurka and Wicas 1979:404; Rosenfeld 2007). What supervisees want and need from educa- tional supervision tends to change over time (Glidden and Tracey 1992), although advanced practitioners “have repeatedly expressed a will- ingness to examine personal issues that affect their relationships with clients” (Sumerel and Borders 1996:269). Schroffel (1999) reported that supervisors rarely offer the advanced edu- cational content that experienced practitioners want, contributing significantly to worker dis- satisfaction. In general, the evidence suggests that educational supervision is dominated by practical content, whether the supervisee is a student, a new social worker, or a senior practitioner (Charles, Gabor and Matheson 1992; Gray, Alperin and Wik 1989; Greenspan, Hanfling, Parker, Primm and Waldfogel 1992; Henry, Hart and Nance 2004; Dow, Hart, and Nance 2009). Apparently, experienced workers yearn for supervisory content that advances their personal growth, whereas supervisors emphasize content that gets the job done. How- ever, the interest in supervised personal devel- opment shown by workers with experience may signal their desire for more challenging work, not psychotherapy (Goodyear and Bernard 1998).

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that were there” (Goin and Kline 1976:43). The objective in raising these feelings for discus- sion was to make the resident aware of them so as to give him “a greater chance for rational control over his interactions with the patient” (42). The objective was not to “probe deeper into the roots of these feelings” for the purpose of therapeutic resolution (see also Hunt 1981). As Haley (1977:187) noted, “A person’s personal life is too important to be tampered with by teachers,” including supervisors (see also Mayer and Rosenblatt 1975b).

Yet, another study reported the following findings:

Three-quarters of the [eight] participants felt that their overall supervision was mostly adequate or effective in processing countertransference. Par- ticipants liked when supervisors communicated to them that they not only considered difficult countertransference reactions to be a normal and expected aspect of psychotherapeutic work, but also welcomed the discussion of these reactions and regarded them as an important and valuable component of the treatment process. . . . [Yet] half the participants also felt that their supervision had at some point in time blurred into personal therapy when discussing countertransference. Most of these respondents found this blurring to be a mixed experience. (Latawiec 2008:iii–iv)

An awareness of the parallel process phenom- enon in supervision interaction is an additional consideration in appropriate application of the principles of teaching-learning and is related to the teaching-therapy dilemma just discussed.

The parallel process Component in Educational Supervision The parallel process, sometimes called the reflection process, has been identified as a phenomenon in supervisory interaction that has considerable significance for educational supervision (Kernberg 2010; Mothersole 1999).

The parallel process suggests that the super- visee reenacts in the supervisory conference the

help,” but only 11 percent of the supervisees pre- ferred this response. Supervisors, more often than supervisees, saw the legitimate source of help for job-related personal problems as lying outside the supervisory relationship (Kadu- shin 1974). Kadushin (1992a) obtained similar responses in an updated survey of supervisors and supervisees. In a study of supervisor behav- ior as identified by ninety-three direct service workers, York and Denton (1990) found that the behavior least frequently engaged in by supervisors was to “advise people on their per- sonal problems,” going on to comment that per- haps supervisors “are not engaging in therapy as supervision to the extent that some of us might have suspected” (99).

The hesitancy of social work supervisors to therapize the relationship reflects a similar tendency in psychotherapeutic trainers of psy- chiatrists. Goin and Kline (1976) videotaped conferences between twenty-four supervisors of second-year psychiatric residents for the purpose of examining how the supervisors dealt with the residents’ countertransference reactions to their patients. Countertransfer- ence was defined as the “therapist’s conscious as well as unconscious reactions toward and feelings about their patients” (41). Surprisingly “for a discipline that often stresses the need for open communication” (42), only twelve of the twenty-four supervisors discussed counter- transference at all, despite the fact that it was evident in each case. Of the twelve supervisors who did, only four discussed it at any length. The supervisors tended to avoid such discus- sion because of hesitancy about converting the educational situation to therapy and because of hesitancy in creating anxiety in the supervisee.

When countertransference was discussed effectively, the supervisors (in a frank, no-non- sense way) called attention to the therapist’s feelings about the patient that were affecting his work. There was no attempt to “explore per- sonal motivations, conscious or unconscious, for residents acting or feeling as they did. It was merely an attempt to acknowledge the feelings

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Through a mirror neuron system, the neural cir- cuits that are activated in someone who is, for example, expressing an emotion, performing a movement, or feeling a sensation, are the very same neural circuits activated in another person who is merely observing the other emote, move, or sense. It has been suggested that this mirroring action allows the observer to automatically and unconsciously know what the other is feeling and experience. (Latawiec 2008:92)

If mirror neurons are “the physiological com- ponent that mediates empathy in the brain,” enabling social workers to “experience and understand the emotions and intentions/states of mind” of their clients “just by hearing and watching them” (Gerdes et al. 2011:114), then the physiology that mediates empathic interaction between supervisors and workers is presumably the same. This idea has led to neuroscience- based speculations regarding the intersubjec- tive dynamics of the parallel-reflection process (Latawiec 2008:92); for example, the empathic supervisor may find herself mirroring the experience of the empathic worker, as the worker recapitulates his mirrored experience of the client, in supervision. In this neurobio- logical model of parallel-process phenomena, empathy—rooted in “nerve cells that allow humans to understand one another’s experi- ence by undergoing a kind of involuntary neu- rological ‘echo’ while observing one another’s behavior” (Gerdes et al. 2011:114)—is transitive.

The parallel process has also been described as an exemplification of isomorphism—the ten- dency for patterns to repeat at different levels of the system. The supervisor-supervisee-client interaction can be viewed as one large system that includes two subsystems: the worker- client subsystem and the supervisor-super- visee subsystem. Isomorphism would suggest that the worker’s dealings with the client in the worker-client subsystem would tend to get reflected in the supervisor-supervisee subsys- tem as a parallel process, and vice versa. The isomorphic nature of service and supervision

behavior that the client manifests in the case- work interview. The supervisor then has avail- able in the here and now of the supervisory conference this additional experiential dimen- sion for understanding the worker’s perfor- mance. Without being consciously aware of this, the supervisee, in attempting to understand the client’s behavior, identifies with it and mimics it for presentation in the supervisory conference so as to obtain help in dealing with it.

The isomorphic nature of service and super- vision is encapsulated in the statement that what the client does with the supervisee, the supervisee will, in turn, do with the supervisor. The client “comes” to supervision through this process. Parallel process events are replica- tions across system boundaries. The problem is transferred from the worker-client setting to the supervisor-supervisee setting.

A client who evokes a sense of disorganiza- tion, confusion, and puzzlement in the worker is paralleled by the supervisee’s evocation of confusion and puzzlement in the supervi- sor when the supervisee presents the case for discussion. After experiencing a client who is evasive and resistant, the worker, in discussing the case, displays an analogous kind of eva- siveness and resistance in interaction with the supervisor. Just as the client generated a feeling of helplessness, frustration, and anger in the worker, the worker evokes feelings of helpless- ness, frustration, and anger in the supervisor. If the supervisor is aware of the source of his feelings in the parallel process, he or she can more effectively help the supervisee in working with the client.

The parallel process has traditionally been explained with the vocabulary of the uncon- scious, such as identification, introjection, pro- jection, projective identification, and related psychodynamic verbs. In a recent review of the considerable controversy about how this may work, Latawiec (2008) noted evidence for a neurobiological explanation rooted in the dis- covery of mirror neurons (e.g., Cozolino 2010; Gerdes and Segal 2011):

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it reenacted in the supervising interaction. It is a form of communication through which the worker, identified with the client, is try- ing to tell the supervisor about the problem. In responding therapeutically to the supervisee enacting the role of the client, the supervisor may model behavior that the supervisee can, in turn, manifest productively toward the cli- ent. This might include a tentative “diagnosis” of the transaction as a parallel process event, for example, paired with an invitation to par- ticipate in collaborative reflection on the super- visory relationship, in the here and now—a possible model for worker-client interactions in the future. For related models, see Cajvert (2011) and Morrissey and Tribe (2001).

If empathy is transitive, the parallel process may also work in reverse, as “what happens in supervision can affect the way supervisees inter- act with clients” (Lietz and Rounds 2009:124). If the supervisor does not actively extend him- self to help the supervisee, the supervisee may repeat this by being indifferent to the client. If the supervisor dominates the supervisee, the supervisee may dominate the client. One of the more frequently cited reverse parallel process examples is one where the supervisor refuses a request for an “emergency” meeting with the supervisee, followed by the supervisee’s refusal of an “emergency” meeting with the client. Although these are examples of negative prac- tice events, Shulman (2010) teaches supervisors to use parallel-process dynamics to be helpful, because “the way the supervisor demonstrates the helping relationship with workers may influence the manner in which staff members relate to clients” (14), and some evidence sug- gests that training helps supervisors develop competencies in this method (Tebes et al. 2011).

It is difficult to differentiate parallel processes in supervision from analogous processes that mirror interactional situations that may relate to each other. Much happens in the supervi- sor-supervisee relationship that is similar to what happens in the worker-client situation because of contextual, structural, and dynamic

is encapsulated in the statement that what the client does with the supervisee, the supervisee will, in turn, do with the supervisor. The client “comes” to supervision through this process. Parallel process events are replications across system boundaries.

Whether parallel process events are explained as neurobiological, systemic, or unconscious phenomena, they are transferred from the worker-client setting to the supervisor- supervisee setting, where their recognition and management has been identified as a “key com- petency” in social work supervision (ASWB 2009:B-1). Manifestations of parallel process supposedly enable the supervisor to perceive what is occurring in the situation between worker and client as it is replicated in the super- visory interaction. Parallel process thus permits second-hand “observation” of the worker per- formance with the client through its reflection in supervision. A supervisor said:

I became aware of the parallel process dynam- ics when I experienced an interaction that illus- trated it. Penny, my supervisee, would shift away from troublesome significant problems by talk- ing, apparently revealingly, about less important matters. Gratified at her open sharing, I rewarded her by going along with the shift and responding to her. In retrospect, I noticed that the client did the same thing with Penny. When Penny raised really difficult questions for discussion, the cli- ent would deftly digress to content, that while relevant, was less significant and less difficult to deal with. Penny rewarded the client’s digression by responding and accepting the shift. Thinking about it, I planned to hold Penny to the difficult matters that needed discussion and in this way help Penny, in turn, to be less accepting of the cli- ent’s evasions.

Parallel process events thus further the diag- nostic and instructional objectives of super- vision. Perception of a parallel process event enables the supervisor to hypothesize about the worker-client relationship as he or she sees

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Although many supervisors and supervisees have observed parallel processes in their prac- tice (Raichelson et al.1997), very limited empiri- cal research (Ellis and Ladany 1997; Mothersole 1999) is available beyond anecdotal and clinical accounts of the phenomena. Doehrman’s (1976) frequently quoted study involved four psychol- ogy counselor trainees, and a study by Fried- lander, Siegel, and Brenock (1989) involved one counselor trainee. More recently, Gray (2005) studied critical incident interactions among six supervisors, four psychotherapy trainees, and their eighteen psychotherapy clients across 84 supervision and 182 therapy sessions. Follow- ing each session, trainees or their clients were interviewed for the most helpful and hinder- ing in-session events, thoughts, and feelings, generating a total of 984 qualitative responses from supervision session interviews and 2,256 qualitative responses from psychotherapy ses- sion interviews. These were coded into cat- egories (e.g., “gained deeper understanding or insight”) by judges and sorted for serial- session qualitative matches in chronological order across all eighteen triads. A total of 216 (156 helpful and 60 hindering) critical incident parallel process interactions were identified, of which 105 involved “the senior partner of the dyad” providing Guidance to the junior partner in the form of direction, suggestions, feedback, or solutions” (Gray 2005:112).

Findings from two larger studies of parallel process, lacking the nuance and texture of case studies, are difficult to interpret. In a sixteen- week field study that examined the supervised practice of one supervisor and four work- ers serving 161 clients, worker ratings of the supervisory relationship were not associated with client ratings of the practice relationship (Harkness 1995). But in a study of twenty-five supervisors, seventy-five counseling students, and seventy-five clients, Patton and Kivlighan (1997) found that student ratings of their working alliances with their supervisors were associated with client ratings of their working alliances with their counselors.

similarities. The worker-client interaction involves a process of growth and change. This is also true of the supervisor-supervisee inter- action. In both interactions, feelings of anxiety, dependency, anger, and resistance are activated. Both interactions involve differences in power and authority and evoke problems regarding openness and defensiveness. Both are highly affective, dyadic contexts in which emotionally charged material is discussed in private. Both contexts are conducive to transference and countertransference evocations. Given these similarities in the two situations and the fact that the dimensions of human relationships are limited and repetitive, that similar things happen in the two situations would not be surprising.

The supervisee is the constant element in the two dyadic subsystems. Both involve interac- tion; both are concerned with the process of helping. Similar psychodynamics operate in both sets of relationships. It might be expected, then, that the feelings evoked in one context by and in the supervisee might be similar to the feelings evoked in the other context in and by the supervisor. This provides the basis for a parallel process. From the vantage point of the parallel process, the two dyadic systems— worker-client and supervisor-supervisee— become one triadic system.

If the worker acts so as to obtain the appro- bation of the supervisor, this is parallel to the behavior of the client in attempting to solicit the approbation of the worker. In both situa- tions, however, the “parallel” behavior is a very natural response to a person having positional power with reference to significant aspects of one’s life. Structural and dynamic similarities between therapy and supervision foster paral- lelisms. Analogous situations evoke analogous behavior (Geidman and Wolkenfeld 1980). As Frawley-O’Dea and Sarnat (2001:173) noted in their literature review, “analytic and super- visory processes overlap and therefore invite regressive and progressive enactments of mul- tidirectional parallelisms.”

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supervisee and that each stage of such growth requires modification in the supervisor’s approach to the supervisee. The modifications are required in response to changing needs of supervisees at different levels of the growth process.

The central idea in these formulations is that the supervisee moves through a series of iden- tifiable, characteristic stages in learning to be a professional social worker, counselor, or clinical psychologist and in developing an identity as a professional.

According to the available research, at the beginning stages in the growth process super- visees need high levels of instruction, structure, and support. They are method and technique oriented with a considerable concern for skill development. The focus in instruction is on the worker-client relationship and the instructional-expert role of the supervisor is given emphasis. The supervisee has a variable sense of professional identity. A coherent theo- retical conception of practice is in the process of formulation. Expectations need modification toward a greater acceptance of realistic limita- tions. The supervisor is directive in a support- security context.

Dependent, anxious, and insecure supervis- ees at this point in their development are highly motivated to acquire technical skills. A consid- erable amount of learning is through imitation in a relationship that is hierarchical, with the supervisor being expert-teacher and proactive in terms of supervisee’s performance.

Initially, the supervisee’s theoretical base of practice is undifferentiated and unsophis- ticated. The image of professional identity is not clearly defined and not clearly owned. The supervisee’s concern is primarily his or her performance. The supervisee is very concerned about competence, needs answers to survive on the job, and is averse to risk taking. There is a naive optimism on the part of the supervisee that achieving a proficient level of competence would invariably permit him or her to be help- ful to all clients.

Albeit an article of faith in clinical practice, Ellis and Ladany (1997:487) have argued that there is too little evidence to support “infer- ences from the observed links between therapy and supervision to the parallel process,” and Mothersole concluded that parallel process is a concept with a long history of wide use, “yet there is very little empirical evidence for its existence. What is required is further study” (Mothersole 1999:116).

developmental Supervision In discussing the different orientations to teaching in educational supervision, we con- cluded that it is difficult to select one best, most appropriate approach because much depended on the context of teaching and the content of teaching. Here we discuss an additional variable that contributes to the difficulty: developmen- tal supervision. As foreshadowed, the teaching- learning principles discussed previously need adaptation and revision at different points in the professional development of the supervisee. This reflects the findings regarding develop- mental supervision. The basic idea of devel- opmental supervision is that the supervisee changes over the course of his development as a competent professional, and such changes in the supervisee require changes in the supervi- sor’s approach. As learning needs change, edu- cational supervision needs to change. Some early, classical expositions of stages in learning to become a social worker by Reynolds (1942) and Towle (1954) embody the ideas of develop- mental supervision.

A number of different attempts have been made to formulate the process of educational supervision in terms of stages of development. Detailed statements of the concepts and stages of developmental supervision are presented in texts by Falender and Shafranske (2004) and Ber- nard and Goodyear (2009). Ellis (2010), Milne (2009), and Stoltenberg and McNeill (1997) have reviewed the related empirical research.

A developmental approach to supervi- sion presupposes that there is growth in the

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complexity, ambiguity, and multicausality of human behavior and the inevitability of failure in achieving definitive understanding.

Originally a figure of omniscience and trans- ference, the supervisor came to be perceived as less infallible and more human. There is increased individuation and separateness from the supervisor (Watkins 1990). A Socratic approach involving a series of challenging ques- tions having an implied direction, stimulating inductive reasoning and self-discovery, is more appropriate with supervisees at more advanced developmental levels than with beginners (Overholser 1991). Stoltenberg et al. (1987:25) summarized these changes as being “a) from greater to lesser need for supervisor-imposed structure; b) from greater to lesser need for didactic instruction; c) from greater to lesser need for direct feedback of counseling behav- ior; d) from greater to lesser need for super- visory support and e) from greater to lesser training/supervision needs in general.”

Over the course of professional development, some needs—such as the need for continuing support and encouragement from the supervi- sor, the need to develop technical skills, and the need for a facilitative relationship—remain constant, if somewhat attenuated.

Although the concept of developmental supervision seems eminently sensible and intu- itively logical, some scientists find the evidence lacking. Ellis and Ladany (1997), for example, described the research on supervisee develop- ment as plagued with disheartening conceptual and methodological problems. Arguing that such models neglect the relationship compo- nent and erroneously assume that all supervises are highly anxious, Ellis (2010:101) concluded, “We have evidence that our supervision models are not accurately depicting what is happening in supervision.” At the heart of the matter is whether studies of the short-term training of practicum students in university settings can serve as viable models of supervisee develop- ment across the professional lifespan in agency practice.

With professional development, changes are made. There is progressively less need for structure, directivity, and didactic instruction. Learning through identification and internal- ization takes the place of learning through imitation. There is a growing need for inde- pendence and autonomy as the ability to make use of such freedom increases. However, the movement in development is not uniformly linear. The supervisee who has achieved self-assured independence may temporarily become dependent again when encountering a difficult client.

The supervisor-supervisee relationship becomes less hierarchical and more collegial, and the supervisor is reactive to supervis- ees. Practice and theory become more inte- grated and theory more differentiated. There is a growing freedom to explore self-awareness issues and dynamics in the worker-client and supervisor-supervisee interactions, with a focus on the supervisee’s contribution to transference and countertransference. There is a growing ability to see the situation from the client’s per- spective and a growing ability to individualize the client. The image of self as a professional social worker becomes clearer and more stable, and there is growing consolidation and integra- tion of professional identity. Confrontation and supervisor self-disclosure is more appropriate at this point in the supervisee’s development than was true earlier. There is a growing acceptance of the limitations of what the profession can accomplish and acceptance of the reality that only some of the clients can be helped some of the time.

Professional development over time involves the growth of technical skills and the growth of a professional identity. The development is from a focus on and concern with self on the part of the supervisee to a gradual freedom to become aware of and appreciate the self-other transactions and their reciprocal effects. This implies a greater willingness to accept the col- laboration of the client in problem solving. There is a gradual greater acceptance of the

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regarding modifications of supervisory behav- ior with increasing professional development and professional maturity of the supervisee need review, however, when applied to an indi- vidual supervisee. Other more idiosyncratic elements, aside from the level of professional development of the supervisee, need to be given consideration—among these, the supervisee’s motivation to achieve and willingness to accept responsibility (York and Hastings 1985–86).

The educational supervisor-supervisee situa- tion is not only developmental, it is persistently interactional, which further complicates the choice of teaching approach. Unlike classroom instruction, educational supervision is primar- ily tutorial. The one-on-one context demands the individualization of the teacher-learner interaction. Because the recipient of the super- visor’s efforts is not inert but reacts in a highly idiosyncratic manner to the supervisor’s actions and in turn affects the supervisor’s response, this is a highly interactional situation. The same intervention by the supervisor may evoke different responses from two different super- visees whose learning needs, styles, and prefer- ences are different. Hence, like the good social worker, the good supervisor has to be sensitive to how her interventions are being received and modify his or her approach to optimize the learning situation for the supervisee.

Summary The following conditions make for an effective learning situation in the context of a positive relationship. People learn best in the following conditions:

1. They are highly motivated to learn. 2. They can devote most of their energies to

learning. 3. Learning is attended by positive satisfactions. 4. They are actively involved in the learning

process. 5. The content to be learned is meaningfully

presented. 6. The uniqueness of the learner is considered.

Attempts have been made to empirically determine whether supervisors actually modify behavior as supervisees change. These find- ings are contradictory. Some studies tend to show that supervisors do make changes in their approach to accommodate differences in needs of supervisees at different stages in development (more or less), but extensive reviews of the lit- erature conducted by Stoltenberg, McNeill, and Crethar (1994) and Worthington (2006) found only weak support for the idea that they actually do so. In direct observation research, for exam- ple, Shanfield, Mohl, Matthews, and Hetherly (1992) were unable to determine that supervi- sory behavior with multiple supervisees varied at all. How supervision affects the development of novice therapists into seasoned professionals has not been fully explored (Bernard and Goodyear 2009; Neufeldt, Beutler, and Banchero 1997).

Applying the suggestions of developmental supervision requires some daunting prereq- uisites. It requires that the supervisor has a clear idea of the particular stage in develop- ment of the supervisee. It requires the super- visor to have a sufficiently varied repertoire of responses and flexibility in application so that he or she can select and implement the response most appropriate to the supervisee’s changing needs. In addition, given the varied competing pressures faced by supervisors, it requires the motivation and energy to make the changes. As Fisher (1989) said, developmen- tal supervision suppositions may be valid and their validity acknowledged by supervisors, but given the fact that “practicing different supervi- sory approaches is a complex and challenging task” and—given the “many demands on the supervisor—customizing supervision sessions may be unrealistic” (71–72).

The literature on developmental supervi- sion has considerable heuristic value, how- ever. It provides the field of supervision with greater clarity regarding the subtle changes that supervisees experience over time and a more refined definition of the variables involved in such changes. These general considerations

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needs of supervisees at different points in their professional developments, with these dif- ferences having been identified in studies of developmental supervision. Parallel process phenomena—reenactments in supervision of clinical problems—may be a component of the educational supervisory process.

There are differences between educational supervision and therapy relating to purpose and focus, role relationships, and process. The distinction is difficult to apply with precision in supervision, although supervisors gener- ally accept the distinction. Educational super- vision requires recognition of the different

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