A counselor educator of the year’s top 10 essentials for effective healthcare student supervision.
Hands-on opportunities are one of the hallmarks of healthcare education. Earning a degree and pursuing licensure often require hundreds or even thousands of hours under the guidance of a skilled supervisor.
At Adtalem Global Education, that includes requirements in programs like Walden University’s MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and optional opportunities to experience nursing careers in Chamberlain University’s Practice Ready. Specialty Focused.TM programs in emergency nursing, nephrology, home health, and perioperative nursing.
The role of the supervisor is vital to a student’s success in the program and their career.
Counselor Educator of the Year Dr. Kim Mason
Dr. Kim Mason has been supervising students throughout her 20-plus-year career, including more than a decade as a faculty member in the Walden University School of Counseling. She’s a licensed professional counselor with her own private practice and a board approved supervisor.
At the 2024 Louisiana Counseling Association conference, she was named Counselor Educator of the Year. She also presented “Qualities for Effective Supervision: Enhancing the Supervisory Relationship.” Her list is pulled from her professional experience, research, and the guidelines and ethical codes of professional associations in her field.
Tips for Supervising Healthcare Students
Here she shares her top 10 tips for supervisors of healthcare students.
- Build a Strong Supervisory Alliance: Creating and maintaining a positive supervisory experience takes work. Supervisors and supervisees need a trusting relationship based on mutual respect. Their communication should be genuine, warm, and nonjudgmental. Effective alliances require active listening, collaborative goal setting, and feedback from both sides of the partnership.
- Create a Safe Space and a Supportive Supervisory Culture: Effective supervisors are vulnerable and open. This builds trust and rapport, especially when supervisors acknowledge the challenges faced by those they are supervising and seek to understand their unique perspectives.
- Enhance Communication and Collaborative Goal Setting: This requires a range of skills from being inquisitive to being culturally sensitive and accepting. Effective communication is clear, concise, immediate, and requires active listening and attentiveness to non-verbal communication. Goal setting is about clarifying expectations, specificity, relevance, and timeliness combined with monitoring progress.
- Art of Flexibility: The best supervisors adapt their approach to fit the needs, preferences, and circumstances of each person they supervise. That can mean modifying goals and objectives, adjusting session formats, and incorporating feedback.
- Cultivate Cultural Sensitivity: Dr. Mason advocates fostering cultural humility using the cultural humility model “HUMBLE”:
- H: Humility acknowledges the limitations of your understanding regarding the supervisee’s values, beliefs, and experiences.
- U: Understand how your own values, assumptions, background, and culture shape the supervisory relationship.
- M: Motivate yourself to actively learn more about the supervisee’s background, culture, and perspective.
- B: Bridge cultural differences into your approach to address power imbalances and foster equity.
- L: Lifelong learning with curiosity and continuous personal growth to advance cultural competence.
- E: Emphasize mutual respect and collaboratively adapt plans to align with cultural norms.
- Maintain Clinical Expertise and Uphold Ethical Identity: For supervisors to be role models and guide others in effective therapy practices, they need to always adhere to ethical standards and be up to date on the latest clinical knowledge. She also stresses knowing when to share knowledge with a supervisee and when to facilitate their independent learning while monitoring and addressing potential ethical concerns.
- Collaborate to Enhance Client Care: Supervisors should also consult with supervisees on their clients. This includes guidance on relevant theoretical approaches, alternative perspectives, and treatment plans.
- Transformative Role of Feedback: Feedback is meant to facilitate learning, growth, and professional development. Supervisors should provide support, validation, and recognition, while inspiring self-reflection, offering assessment, and enhancing skill development.
- Facilitate Reflective Practice: One way to do this is by asking reflective questions like “What emotions did you experience during the session, and how did they influence your interactions with the client?” or “What assumptions or beliefs do you hold about this client’s situation, and how might they impact your counseling approach?”
- Promote Self-Care: Burnout is so prevalent in healthcare professions. Supervisors need to model a healthy work-life balance and normalize self-care. Supervisors should challenge perfectionism, self-criticism, and unrealistic expectations to help supervisees be focused, mindful, and empathetic.
“Some see self-care as being selfish,” says Dr. Mason. “But if you’re exhausted, burned out, or have compassion fatigue, it’s very difficult for you to help your clients.”
Considering all 10 qualities of effective supervisors, Dr. Mason concludes that the most important is developing the supervisory relationship.
Earn a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision
Walden University offers an online PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision program that is accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP).
The program offers core courses such as Clinical Supervision in which “students engage in experiential applications, discussions, and self-reflective assignments that focus on the strategies for working with supervisees representing diverse backgrounds and developmental and learning styles.”
For more information, email the Adtalem Global Communications Team: adtalemmedia@adtalem.com.
