Validez y confiabilidad de los instrumentos

The discourse of supervision as development can be seen to have its roots in the context of training. As identified above, the UK is relatively unusual in its culture of the practice of post-qualifying supervision and much of the influential literature on supervision derives from a context where supervision is provided only at pre- qualifying levels. This inevitably shapes the way supervision is conceived and it is from this context that developmental models of supervision have also been proposed (Stoltenberg and Delworth 1987). These models are based on the assumption that a developing practitioner needs to travel through a sequence of developmental stages in order to become proficient. Definitions of supervision drawing from this discourse also tend to characterise the supervisory relations as one between a senior and more junior practitioner, such as that offered by Bernard and Goodyear (Bernard and Goodyear 1998). Within a training context, the boundary between supervision as a formative process and an evaluative process is relatively undisputed; students of any subject would normally expect to be both assessed and enabled. However, in post-

qualifying environments, these two aspects take on very different associations. At the very heart of entering a profession lies the expectation that a practitioner is now entrusted with a mandate to practise relatively autonomously. So whilst supervision’s formative function is relatively unproblematic, any evaluative function attributed to it risks conflating clinical and managerial supervision as well as the potential for practitioners to view it with suspicion. Fish and Twinn (1997), in attempting to make the distinction clear to a wide audience of ‘health care professionals’: assert

our definition of supervisor – whomever the supervisee works with – is not

that of ‘overseeing manager’ but of ‘educational collaborator’

(Fish and Twinn 1997 p2).

Their approach focuses on professional development rather than initial training: clinical supervision as rooted firmly in education rather then in training and regards the clinical supervisor as an agent of professional development rather than as a control mechanism.

(Fish and Twinn 1997 p3). But nonetheless, its emphasis on education illustrates a commitment to supervision as development as an ongoing process.

Zorga (2002) also proposes a model whereby supervision can be seen as a process of lifelong learning, the ‘developmental-educational model of supervision’:

In this context, supervision is understood as a specific learning, developmental and supportive method of professional reflection and

counselling, enabling professional workers …to acquire new professional and

personal insights through their own experiences

(Zorga 2002 p265). In this model, she disputes Kadushin’s (1992) hierarchical structure of the

supervisor/supervisee relationship. She argues that “supervisees should come, if possible, from different working organisations or at least from different departments of the organisation” enabling workers to “talk about their worries, fears, work

problems and mistakes more openly and with greater freedom”. Her argument is that this approach enables and encourages the exploration of “more options, more

Once we have recognised the meaning of an experience or an event, we frequently come to the realisation that it is actually an experience of several generations, which has already been recorded in numerous professional papers. It is, however, necessary that we come to such an enlightenment by ourselves. Once the experience and the meaning have been integrated, they become our wisdom...That means that in supervision, work, education and personal development are linked together through the process of experiential learning.

(Zorga 2002 pp265-267)

In this way, Zorga locates her model in a developmental frame, drawing from the work of Kolb and his foundational writing on experiential learning (Kolb 1984):

The use of experience in the supervision process corresponds to Kolb’s

model of learning as a cyclical process in which four activities interact: the concrete experience, its reflection, its abstract conceptualisation and experimentation.

(Zorga 2002 p268).

The supervisor’s role is, therefore, to guide workers in their learning cycle. This is why, Zorga argues, the role of the supervisor is different to that of mentor (or preceptor) whose role is involved primarily in instructing, advising, monitoring,

guiding etc. “That is why the supervisor should be primarily an expert in supervision, while a mentor must be an expert in the same profession” (Zorga 2002 p268).

Other writers express the need to articulate the learning potential of clinical

supervision in order that it remains relevant through and beyond qualification (Brigley and Robbe 2005; Bruijn, Busari and Wolf 2006; Launer 2006).

In the same way that acceptance of the assumption that supervision should not be therapy seems to have attained the status of a ‘given’, so too has acceptance that an effective practitioner is one who engages in reflective practice and that supervision is a forum in which this should be encouraged and developed. It appears to be widely accepted as a means by which a professional can develop the requisite complex skills which will enable him/her to become a capable and autonomous practitioner,

drawing from the influential writing of Schön and others (Schön 1983; 1987) and now firmly embedded in most professional education programmes. There have,

however, been some challenges to this assumption in the literature and these are explored in depth in the discussion. For the purposes of the construction of the discursive frame, it is important to include the discourses around reflective practice as part of the dominant discourse of supervision as development.