Training for Competency in Professional Psychology: A Canadian Perspective

Clinical supervision in a competency-based era

Since clinical supervision has become recognized as a distinct professional practice, competency-based supervision has gained considerable traction internationally. Competency-based supervision enhances accountability and is compatible with evidence-based approaches. Competency-based supervision is defined by supervisor and supervisee collaboratively and explicitly identifying the knowledge, skills and attitudes comprising each clinical competency, determining specific learning strategies, and monitoring and evaluating the development of those. Recommendations for supervision practice are described based on the growing evidence base for practice and responsive to emerging ethical and legal issues.

Supervision

The authors provide reaction to the Major Contribution (MC) “Multicultural Clinical Supervision and Benchmarks: Empirical Support Informing Supervision Practice and Supervisor Training.” The article begins with an overview reaction to the MC. Following this, each of the four articles that compose the MC are discussed. The reactions provide both a contextual response to the articles as well a response to the central theme of the MC—that is, the intersection of supervision, multiculturalism, and the competency benchmarks.

Multicultural Clinical Supervision and Benchmarks

The purpose of this Major Contribution is to provide background knowledge and context for competency-based clinical supervision and to showcase a diversity of methodologically sound empirical approaches to study effective supervision, including multiculturally competent supervision, and comparative perspectives on supervision cross-culturally. The intent is to begin to provide the empirical data necessary to assist the supervisor in supporting supervisees’ development of the benchmark competencies and to provide direction for future training of supervisors. Specifically, the articles in this major contribution address competencies in clinical supervision and the Competency Benchmarks on three pivotal topics: empirical support defining effective supervision, innovative empirically based approaches to cross-cultural and international supervision, and an empirical analysis of feminist supervision in a multiculturally diverse group context. Each of the articles addresses particular Competency Benchmarks and provides prototypical models of rigorous research procedures to inform the practice of multicultural supervision and training of supervisors, and implications.