Supervision Skills Are Used by Supervisors in Supervision Session: Qualitative Research on Social Work Supervision

Abstract

Social workers have become accustomed to being supervised, but there remains an uneasiness regarding the legitimacy of this supervision. To reduce this uneasiness, it is necessary to create an ideal image of a supervision session and an index for supervisors to evaluate their own skills after the session. In this paper, the author shows the process of such a supervision session and the kind of supervisory skills used for every stage during the session.

Twelve supervisory sessions held by supervisors with more than 10 years of work experience were studied, and 634 skills seen during the sessions were divided into three categories:these were skills that the supervisees themselves presented, skills that promoted communication of supervisees, and skills that promoted reflection and recognition by supervisees. It was clear that the preferred approach was to promote the recognition by supervisees of problems in their own growth begins from the initial stages of supervision session. In addition, supervisor perseverance was strongly needed, and an approach was created that used a progressive increase in skills for supervisees who did not recognize a problem in their growth during the development stage.