Clinical Supervision in a Medical Setting: A Preliminary Study About the Practices and Beliefs of Expert and Novice Clinician Supervisors
This project explores perceptions of the clinical supervision practices from the perspective of expert and novice speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in a medical setting. Expert and novices may have different philosophies and beliefs about supervision that could impact a young clinician's learning (Peña & Kiran, 2008). An expert was defined as having more than five years of clinical experience in the medical setting with supervision experience of at least 10 students. Novice clinicians had worked for less than five years and had supervised a minimum of one student. An interview adapted from counseling literature (Okech & Rubel, 2009), was used to collect data on beliefs about supervision practices of two expert and two novice SLPs supervising graduate students at a hospital in Texas. Results indicated that novices were more likely to experience stress related to supervision and did not provide regular feedback to their supervisees in comparison to their expert peers. Experts were more likely to have a positive view of supervision and provide feedback more consistently. These reported differences in perceptions have implications for clinical teaching as novices and experts may have different ways of supervising potentially impacting learning for beginning speech-language pathology clinicians.