This is the third of four posts I have planned related to my session at the ResearchED National Conference on Saturday 9th September. In the first post, I outlined why I believe that recent evidence indicates that there is a need for supervision within education. In the second post I explored what is, and isn’t, meant by the term ‘supervision’. The series will conclude with an outline of a model of responsive, reflective supervision that might be a best bet for supporting and challenging school leaders and staff.
In this third post, I will provide an overview of some of the most recognised models of supervision utilised in other helping professions. Drawing from Bernard & Goodyear (2013) and their encyclopaedic overview of models, as well as specific papers from some of the models’ authors, I will explore three categories of models from other helping professions.
- Psychotherapy-Based Models
- Developmental Models
- Process Models
At the end of each section, I will attempt to outline which models of supervision in each of these areas might hold promise for adaptation to meet the demands of the education sector. In the conclusion of this post I will attempt to bring together these thoughts to outline a way of thinking about the use of models of supervision within education that pays attention to the theoretical, the developmental and the processual together.
Pyschotherapy-Based Models of Supervision
Bernard & Goodyear acknowledge the impact that psychotherapy has had on models of supervision as being historically located in the fact that supervision in these professions has had the longest history, dating back to Freud who once jokingly suggested that Jung needed better supervision. In psychotherapy, supervision has long been used as a teaching and learning process that focuses on the interplay of relationships between the patient, their therapist and their supervisor. The focus in supervision is upon teaching that helps therapists understand relational dynamics for the benefit of future work with clients.
Eagle & Long, in The Wiley International Handbook of Clinical Supervision (2014) by Watkins and Milne, point to the challenges of such an approach. They quote Pedder in saying that supervision is “more than education and less than psychotherapy”. More descriptively they acknowledge that whilst the initial formulation of supervision was as a educative “in practice, however, it is very difficult for the supervisor to separate the supervisee’s personal issues”. This leads to an ongoing debate about whether psychotherapy-based supervision should be “primarily didactic” or “primarily experiential”.
This conflict is evident in two of the models presented by Bernard and Goodyear. On the one hand are ‘humanistic-relationship oriented supervision’ and ‘constructivist’ models whilst, on the other is ‘cognitive-behavioural supervision’. The former tend to lean heavily towards the “primarily experiential” (especially in the case of constructivist approaches), whilst the latter more heavily emphasise the “primarily didactic”.
Humanist-relationship approaches to supervision derive from the insights of Carl Rogers (1942), who advocated a client-centred and therapeutic focus in which “supervision for me becomes a modified form of the therapeutic interview”. As well as helping supervisees to expand their knowledge of relevant theories and techniques, for Bernard and Goodyear humanist-relationship supervision also builds the capacity of supervisees to explore their sense of self and “their skill in the use of self as a change agent”. These approaches require supervisors to trust that supervisees have the ability and motivation to grow (and that they feel the same way about their clients).
Constructivist or, broadly speaking, postmodernist approaches to supervision see ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ as being contextual and existing “as creations of the observer”. Knowledge, for constructivists, is created in interaction and so, unsurprisingly, they lean further away from the didactic that humanist-relationship approaches. Supervisors are there to help supervisees edit their narratives, moving from a “state of knowing” to “a state of curiosity” and, in doing so forfeiting much of their status.
Frawley & O’Dea, in The Supervisory Relationship (2001), advocate the “deprivileging” of supervisor authority within supervision, moving away from the “general authority” with which they begin the relationship towards “mutuality and negotiation” with the supervisee. It is through this interaction that the “supervisory relationship”, not the supervisor, “is authorised and reauthorised”. This requires that the supervisor seeks to both invite and model processes of collaboration through the sharing of their own experiences (provided that these are not disclosed as being truths).
Cognitive-behavioural supervision is, in stark contrast, a psychotherapy-based model of supervision that privileges the supervisor’s knowledge. It is more specific and systematic, based on the belief that “both adaptive and maladaptive behaviours are learned”. The concern of such supervisory models, for Bernard and Goodyear, is that supervisees learn to develop and demonstrate greater technical mastery. Therefore, the goals and processes of the supervision relationship are more highly prized, including greater use of agreed agendas, the setting of focused homework and the routine assessment of supervisee learning. Unlike humanist-relationship or constructivist approaches to supervision which blur the boundaries of therapy and supervision, in cognitive-behavioural supervision “the distinction between training and supervision can become more blurred”.
In this way, psychotherapy-based models of supervision offer a trad-prog divide that will be familiar to those of us who have worked in education. Debates about whether the teaching and learning process should be “primarily didactic” or “primarily experiential” remains a bone of contention. But what can we draw out about how clinical or reflective supervision in education might look from these psychotherapy-based approaches? I would argue that a “primarily didactic” approach to supervision might work best in the case of supervision being built into the training structures for both new entrants to the profession and new entrants to school leadership programmes. This would, however, require a significant remodelling of the Early Career Teacher (ECT) and the National Professional Qualification (NPQ) programmes.
There would be less room for a didactic approach for ongoing professional supervision that is, as would be the case in the current landscape, voluntaristic in nature. Perhaps the one area in which a didactic psychotherapy-based approach might have some resonance in current school staff development processes would be with regards to support plans and capability processes which are, by necessity, involuntaristic and require greater levels of direction. To achieve this, though, schools would need to take a view of support/capability in which there was a distinct belief that it could make a difference to the colleague.
In the previous post in this series, I articulated a view that supervision in education ought not to be seen as equivalent to therapy or counselling, even though it may serve therapeutic purposes as it strives to help the supervisee become better at the primary focus of their work. Bernard and Goodyear believe that psychotherapy-based approaches “may blur the boundary between therapy and supervision” and this is most evident in humanist-relationship and constructivist approaches. So, whilst these models may well offer something of value to the potential for supervision in education they do not offer the scope for wholesale translation into schools, not least of all because they rest upon supervisors possessing substantive and substantial knowledge of psychodynamic processes.
Developmental Models of Supervision
Bernard and Goodyear identify how developmental models of supervision, ones which are “organised around the needs of the supervisee”, rather than the theory of psychotherapy, came to dominate during the 1980s. They were, according to Hawkins and McMahon, “the first models to be specifically developed for supervision”. Broadly speaking, all developmental models are based on assessment of the level of supervisee professional development against standards of performance. A key distinction is that different models describe development along either linear stages or nonlinear psychosocial domains, and each of these types of model will be considered here.
The Loganbill, Hardy and Delworth model is one of the linear progression models, with supervision focusing on eight professional competencies of training therapists (competence, emotional awareness, autonomy, professional identity, respect for individual differences, purpose and direction, personal motivation and professional ethics). Their developmental model sees the movement of trainees from (i) the stagnation stage to (ii) the confusion stage and eventually to (iii) the integration stage.
In periods of stagnation the supervisee can either be dependent on their idealised supervisor or can deem them to be irrelevant. In periods of confusion they can move from dependency to anger at their supervisor as they realise that something is wrong but for which a resolution is not apparent. In the integration stage, the supervisee has a realistic view of the supervisor, taking more responsibility for their own development and holding expectations that are more consistent with what supervision can offer. Although Loganbill asserts that the model is nonlinear and complex because supervision “cycles and recycles through” developmental stages, there is clearly still a ‘correct’ progression route through such a developmental matrix.
A second linear model is the Integrated Development Model (IDM) developed by Stoltenberg and colleagues, which is the “best known and most widely used” developmental supervision model according to Bernard and Goodyear.
The model benefits from being both descriptive of supervisee processes and prescriptive about supervisor intentions. Like Loganbill et al’s model, the IDM identifies a group of three “overriding structures that provide markers in assessing professional growth” (self-other awareness, motivation and autonomy) alongside four stages of development within these areas. Hawkins and McMahon identify these stages as being ‘self-centred’, ‘client-centred’, ‘process-centred’ and ‘process-in-context-centred’ and argue that the model, whilst drawn from psychotherapy, “fits well for most helping professions”. At the same time as these authors view the IDM approach as being helpful in seeing the progression of a supervisee within and between the different stages of development, they argue that it can seen as a “blueprint” for development which can be used too rigidly.
Generally, Bernard and Goodyear are somewhat wary of stage development models, which only have “some evidence to support some aspects” of their claims. These models are relatively weak in describing learning styles within the stages of development and are relatively silent “about divergent learning paths”. Drawing from what evidence does support, they assert that “cognitive complexity matters”, that development of more advanced supervisees is “more idiosyncratic” and that development happens beyond formal training.
In contrast to these linear stage models is Rigazio-DiGilio’s Systemic Cognitive-Developmental Supervision Model, which is based on the cognitive style of the supervisee. Drawn from a Piagetian theoretical basis, the model identifies four cognitive orientations that supervisees can develop (and within which they have preferences pre-existing supervision). These cognitive orientations – sensorimotor, concrete operations, formal operations, dialectic/systemic – offer both ‘competencies’ and ‘constraints for their users (see example below) and therefore “no one type is superior to the other”. Development within this model, for Bernard and Goodyear, comes from supervisees being “assisted in expanding their conceptual and experiential capabilities while not forfeiting their original ‘natural’ style”.
In A Cognitive-Developmental Model for Marriage and Family Therapy Supervision (1994), Rigazio-Digilio and Anderson explain that those with a sensorimotor orientation rely on sensory data or feelings. Facts are the preference for those working with a concrete operations orientation. Those with a formal operations orientation focus on recurring patterns. Wider sociocultural contexts are the preferred lens for those with a dialectic-systemic orientation. They argue that development is essentially nonlinear and that “supervisee growth is an idiosyncratic journey toward cognitive complexity”. Sequential and hierarchical models can help identify the sophistication levels of supervisees, but they are “insufficient to inform and guide the immediate work of supervision” which has to take account of the nonlinearity and complexity of what supervisees bring to the process.
Instead, their cognitive-developmental model guides the actual practice of supervision through three phases: the assessment of supervisee orientation or orientations to identify preferred ways of working; the co-construction of a supervisory environment that works to enhance the competencies and restrict the constraints of the supervisees preferred orientation(s); facilitating the development of the supervisee by style-shifting that enables them to work effectively across all orientations. The ultimate goal of the model is both ‘horizontal’ development within dominant orientations and ‘vertical’ development within under-utilised orientations (see example below).
This nonlinear approach, according to Bernard and Goodyear, makes the model excellent for assessing the experiences and conceptualisations of supervisees. They also say that Rigazio-DiGilio’s model is relevant for supervisees at any level, which is important given Hawkins and McMahon contention that most developmental models “do not attend to professional development needs in post-qualification experience”.
For these reasons, and similarly to the conclusions for supervision practice within education drawn about the psychotherapy-based models, developmental supervision models might offer different strengths at different stages for different groups of school staff. The more linear stage developmental models might helpfully and usefully be drawn into ECT and NPQ programmes for teachers and school leaders who are relative novices working towards expertise within those domains. Clearly, this would involve identifying what facets are most important to the professional development of novices (the existing teacher and headteacher standards perhaps) and also what stages of development are typical for those developing in those facets. Should the focus be on stagnation, confusion and integration? Would the movement from self-centred to client-centred to process-centred to process-in-context-centred work?
In the immediate context of the education sector, as previously stated, clinical and reflective supervision is more likely to develop from the top-down than from the bottom-up. To get to a ‘supervision for all’ position within schools, it is likely that the gatekeepers for such a process will be trusts, governing bodies and headteachers ensuring that the provision for supervision is made available to senior postholders such as school leaders and designated safeguarding leads. In this context, nonlinear developmental models would appear to offer the most potential in order to cope with the ‘idiosyncratic’ needs of post-qualification professionals who have not had a history of working with supervision in our ‘idiosyncratic’ (certainly amongst the helping professions) sector. If this is true, then Rigazio-DiGilio’s systemic cognitive-developmental model would appear to provide a reasonable model on which to build education context-specific features. The model not only offers a series of orientations that translate well to the sector, but also an in-built link to supervision processes that recognises the expertise of the supervisor whilst also drawing from the experiences and preferences of the supervisee. In doing so, it goes some way to closing the didactic-experiential gap discussed in the previous section.
Process Models of Supervision
The final group of supervision models I want to address in this post are process models of supervision. Whilst complementary to psychotherapy-based and developmental approaches, these models shift the emphasis from theory and from supervisee need in order to “describe and illuminate supervisor functions, roles and processes” (Hawkins & McMahon).
The simplest of the three models I will look at in this section of the post is the Discrimination Model advocated by Bernard in the 1970s, although Bernard points to the complexity of the supervision process and, with Goodyear, explains that “the model is only the beginning of truly discriminating supervision”. The author outlines three foci for the supervision process related to supervisee competence, which is the ultimate goal of supervision. These are their intervention or process skills (supervisee actions), their conceptualisation skills (supervisee understanding) and their personalisation skills (supervisee style). She also outlines three roles that supervisors need to be able to adopt: as teacher (providing structure through instruction, modelling and feedback), as counsellor (enhancing reflectivity as well as cognition), and consultant (helping supervisees trust their insights and develop autonomy). Marrying these foci and roles together creates a 3 x 3 grid that enables the supervisor to consider nine different “situation-specific” ways of responding to how the supervisee is presenting (see example below).
As well as acknowledging that the model is only a start for a supervision process, Bernard and Goodyear recognise that the preferences of the supervisor could mean that they focus on aspects of the grid that do not meet the most salient needs of the supervisor, and that the level of expertise of the supervisee might affect the supervisor’s choices (e.g. taking a teacher role with a novice and a consultant role with an expert). They also recognise that the role of ‘consultant’ is less well understood, probably because the roles of teacher and counsellor are “more inherently familiar to supervisors”.
In a similar, but significantly more complex, model Holloway’s Systems Approach to Supervision links five supervisor functions to five supervision tasks (again focused on supervisee competence) to create a 25-square grid for the supervision process (see below).
What makes this model even more complex is that supervisor functions and supervision tasks are only two of seven components (see below). There are, in addition to this, four sets of contextual factors and the ‘core factor’ of the supervision relationship. There is not enough time in this post to consider the full complexity of this particular model, but it can be found in Holloway’s 1999 essay on A Framework for Supervision Training.
Another process model for supervision is Hawkins and Shohet’s Seven-Eyed Model of Supervision, which the authors describe as being “both relational and systemic”. The model is based on the view that there are two distinct matrices at play within the supervision process, the client-practitioner (supervisee) matrix and the supervisee-supervisor matrix (and often these matrices will never physically overlap. These matrices are themselves nested “within wider contexts that can impinge on and have the power to alter them” (Bernard & Goodyear). The complexity of these embedded layers of interactional influence requires supervisors to pay attention to six modes (eyes) of supervision plus a seventh mode that focuses on the wider context within which supervision and client work happens.
- Focusing on the clients and what and how they present.
- Focusing on the supervisee’s strategies and interventions.
- Focusing on the relationship between the client and the supervisee.
- Focusing on the supervisee.
- Focusing on the supervisory relationship.
- The supervisor focusing on their own experience.
- Focusing on the wider contexts in which the work happens.
A diagrammatic version of the seven eyed model of supervision looks like this:
Bernard and Goodyear conclude that “the Hawkins and Shohet model provides a more expansive picture of supervision and their factors including references to both theory and development”. It offers less potentially for rigidity and positional thinking on the part of the supervisor by removing the 3 x 3 or 5 x 5 grids of other process models. Instead, the model asks supervisors to pay attention to different individuals, different relationships and different contextual factors that might play a part in understanding what is going on in the widest sense possible. Hawkins and McMahon explain that this requires experienced supervisors to be able to “skilfully use each of the main modes” and “how to move effectively and appropriately from one mode to another in a timely fashion”.
To provide some guidance for how to handle the complexity of this task, they note the “common pattern” of supervision in starting with modes 1 and 2, which in turn lead on naturally to modes 3 and 4. Difficulties in processing the material generated in these modes can prompt the supervision process in the direction of modes 5 and 6. At the end of the typical supervision session, attention may focus back to modes 2 and 1 to enable the supervisee to focus on “what new interventions the supervisee might rehearse and bring back to their work” with the client. Mode 7, in later versions of the seven eyed model, explicitly link to each of the six other modes and can therefore be explored at any point in the process at which wider contextual consideration may be deemed appropriate.
The process models of supervision outlined above, for me, range from the complicated to the genuinely complex. Perhaps it reflects my negative experience of working with Assessing Pupil Progress grids (remember those, reader?) but the grid like nature of the Discrimination Model, and the Systems Approach to Supervision Model feel like a mechanistic approach to thinking about something much more holistic. I recognise that they are not intended for use in such ways, and that grids can help simplify thinking about complex processes in ways that can be very helpful to practice. But it is exceedingly easy for such simplifications to create rigidity in thinking, to become tickbox exercises or (as the authors point out) for certain strands of the simplified model to become more habitual and patterned even though the intention of teasing out the strands is intended for exactly to opposite effect.
There is an argument, familiar to those made earlier in this post, that the grid-based process models might work well in education for those early in their teaching careers and those early in their leadership roles. Supervision for such professionals might be more likely to involve a specific focus on the roles of both the supervisee and supervisor that could benefit from them being clearly identified for the partners in the supervision arrangement. In the event that there is a wider adoption of supervision processes, for example across a trust, these grids offer a simplification of the complex that might support novice supervisors in their work supporting equally novice teachers and leaders (as well as a reporting strand for those responsible for such wider provision that is easy to evaluate).
The Seven Eyed Supervision Model is a more obviously complex model for thinking about the processes of supervision. Although it provides a potential tickbox for ensuring that the different modes are employed within the supervisory relationship, it is far less prescriptive (and therefore rigid) in helping supervisors make sense of experience within each of the modes. For these reasons, it is therefore perhaps more suitable for experienced supervisors in education working with more experienced practitioners who may well have mastered already most of the competencies of their role but who nevertheless have need of supervision. The Hawkins and Shohet model might also prove to be fruitful as the basis of a curriculum for the training of and development of supervisors within a more widely applied model of the kind discussed in the previous paragraph.
Conclusions
In coming to the end of their analysis of ‘first generation models’ of supervision, Bernard and Goodyear recognise that process models of supervision are not sufficient on their own. Instead, their belief is that the three types of models discussed in this post – theory, development and process – all have a part to play in effective supervision.
“Good supervisors incorporate tenets from psychological theory, an awareness of supervisee development, and an appreciation for supervision process in their approach to supervision.”
This post has attempted to provide an overview of the most prominent supervision models used by other helping professions in order to consider their potential application within the education sector. Taking Bernard and Goodyear’s point above, it would seem that there are two distinct strands of potential for taking some features of the models discussed and how they might work for school staff.
The first of these is around a possible future model for education in which supervision is thoroughly embedded in professional practice of teachers and school leaders from the outset of their training in either domain. For novice teachers and leaders, this overview of the models would suggest that the primarily didactic psychotherapy-based approaches might be more helpful alongside more linear stage-based developmental models. Given the necessity for many supervisors within such a model, it may be that grid-led process models of supervision might, although limited in some hands, provide a reasonably effective way of ensuring a regularity of approach that ensures the appropriate level of challenge for those novices in exploring alternative approaches on their way to professional competence.
The second potential strand is around a more top-down, perhaps more contextually relevant, approach to education as it is rather than education as we might wish it to be. In this strand, the emphasis will be upon working with voluntaristic early adopters of supervision within education, almost certainly to come from the ranks of headteachers, senior leaders and others with clearly defined roles such as designated safeguarding leads. For these practitioners, this overview of the different models has suggested that they would benefit more from the primarily experiential psychotherapy-based models alongside nonlinear orientation-based approaches to development. With fewer supervisors required to provide supervision to this cadre of leaders, it would arguably be more effective to use more holistic process models and to ensure that they are trained to work with the greater complexity these necessitate.
Of course, these are simplifications and effective supervision within education might well draw from a greater range of models than those outlined here, or develop a more contextually specific model of our own. Bernard and Goodyear, as well as providing a rich summary of models used in other helping professions, caution that such models are only conceptual maps for supervision and that, however important the models are, the supervisory relationship involves much more, including interventions, evaluation planning and ethics. In the final post of this series, I will attempt to marry together the information on models from this post with insights from the previous posts on the specific needs within education for supervision, and some of the issues arising from what supervision means to us in the education sector. In doing so, I hope to provide a working outline of what reflective clinical supervision might actually look like for school leaders and school staff more generally.
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September 12th, 2023 → 5:41 pm
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