In her article, "Creating a Safe Place for Growth in Supervision," Shirley Emerson (1996) illuminated the need for supervisors to adopt a supportive and nurturing group supervision model that promotes student learning and growth. Instead of focusing solely on the students' failures to perform in accordance with the supervisors' pre-established criteria, supervisors should provide students with a safe environment for exploring the latter's strengths weaknesses in a cooperative endeavor with their peers. To facilitate the implementation of nurturing group supervision sessions, Emerson (1996) also presented the four basic norms for supervision sessions and identified the stages of development of an ideal supervision group (pp. 393-401).
Since Emerson's (1996) four fundamental norms of supervision sessions provide an effective framework for creating supervision groups, they will be described individually:
Supervisors should pay close attention to their students' statements and delivery of therapy to model appropriate listening skills.
Supervisors should refrain from using negative remarks in their critique of students. Whenever possible, they should infuse their comments with humor.
Supervisors should respect students' assertion of autonomous thoughts and ideas. Thus, students should be allowed to deviate from the supervisors' techniques and practices, without being reprimanded.
Supervisors should protect the confidentiality of the students' statements revealed in the supervision group in order to encourage genuine discussions (pp. 397-8).
Through her discussion, Emerson (1996) highlighted several important points. First of all, therapists who feel that they must comply with their supervisors' expectations tend to suppress their natural and intuitive reactions to their clients' statements. As a result, these therapists lose confidence in their own abilities to help their clients. Their discomfort with themselves...