Current Limitations of Traditional Supervision Methods
While this vignette took place twenty years ago, it remains a fresh example of the current limitations of our field’s “traditional supervision” (TS) method. Broadly speaking, TS suffers from training therapists to get good at talking about therapy in supervision and not necessarily as good at actually doing therapy in session (Vaz & Rousmaniere, 2024, 2022; Miller et al., 2020). This can be illustrated through the approach TS takes to teaching and learning and what it does and does not include as part of its structure:
Taken together – an over-reliance on conceptual learning and not utilizing recording technologies and routine outcome-measures –, the traditional supervisory process ends up spending too much time and energy on abstractions and not enough on acquiring specific therapy skills to aid in the supervisee’s concrete clinical challenges (Axelsson et al., 2023; Boswell, Constantino, & Goldfried, 2020; Vaz & Rousmaniere, 2022, 2024). Any form of supervision has a great deal to accomplish in a limited window of time. Refining the field’s supervisory learning methods and structure are promising contributions that deliberate practice (DP) can offer to traditional supervision.