Learning from clinical supervision collaborations

Collaboration is hard. Collaborations are even more challenging when they cross disciplines and national boundaries.

That’s one of my take-aways from the experience of curating a special issue on Cross-disciplinary and Cross-national Collaborations in Clinical Supervision – that instead is being published as a special section. In fact, authors of several proposals accepted for the special issue had to withdraw due to varied challenges in completing their projects; these authors were based outside the US, greatly limiting the representation of international perspectives in the special section. Nevertheless, the four articles do at least begin to approach the goal of featuring “researchers’ and practitioners’ efforts to promote, build, implement, and/or sustain clinical supervision collaborations (e.g., teams or partnerships) that involve authors from at least two disciplines and/or at least two countries)” (Borders, 2022, p. 2).

For example, Goodyear et al. (2023) tackled an ambitious US-China collaboration for supervisor training. They describe how they have continuously adapted both the content and pedagogy over several years of training 600+ supervisors in China. Lessons learned included unintentional cultural violations (e.g., instructor kneeling beside a small group to hear better) and limited viability of US-based conceptual models (e.g., differences in assessing developmental levels with Chinese supervisees). Morales et al. (2023) stressed “teamwork, trust, and vulnerability” (p. 26) as key to their successful collaboration of three disciplines in creating a training program around diversity, equality, and inclusion for genetic counseling supervisors. In essence, as they report, their process included the very principles and practices they were planning to present. Newman et al. (2023) led a group supervision experience for school psychology and behavior analysis students. They noted the practicality of this cross-disciplinary supervision, given that the two professions often partner to address student issues in schools. Students found the feedback from peers in the other profession quite valuable; they even suggested adding students from other allied professions in the schools (e.g., speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, school counselors) in future supervision groups. The Moore et al. (2023) group describe their initial experiences in producing the Clinical Supervision Connection podcast, working across disciplinary and international borders. They found their collaboration required a reflexive and evolving process, based in skills fundamental to the clinical supervision process itself.

The special section on collaborations certainly builds on the inaugural editors’ goals for The Clinical Supervisor. Both Munson (1983) and Shulman and Safyer (2003) believed the journal could bring together researchers through recognizing similarities across their disciplines. Forty years later, the special section articles illustrate four examples of researchers, practitioners, and trainers building collaborations based on their commonalities while honoring, and learning from, their distinct variations. The authors’ reports suggest other efforts to engage in collaborative conversations can only broaden, deepen, and enrich our understanding of clinical supervision – and ourselves as clinical supervisors. I hope the special section inspires readers’ thoughts about possible cross-disciplinary and cross-national collaborative efforts, despite the challenges.