Designing Pro-Learning Supervision

Supervision is a mentorship and teaching relationship aimed at promoting adult learning as the professional therapist learns and develops their clinical skills. The authors discuss their experience conceptualizing supervision as teaching and the importance of supervision being constructed as a pro-learning relationship. The purpose of this article is to provide discussion and examples of how supervisors can utilize teaching strategies to construct expectations for spontaneous and structured learning, solidify therapists’ prior learning, and help therapists consciously challenge and enhance their knowledge schemas. Supervision is a prime opportunity to promote the expectation of and excitement for continuous, life-long learning. To this end, the authors review four specific teaching strategies—scaffolding, agentic feedback, retrieval, and interleaving—to promote pro-learning supervision. They provide brief examples from their own work as supervisors and encourage readers to conceptualize their own supervision opportunities to use the four teaching strategies to design pro-learning supervision.