Supervision for social science workers
October 19, 2007
Imaginif offers supervision to child and family workers: case workers, community welfare, social work and psychology. We offer a supervision program that best suits your own learning, debriefing and personal needs. We love tutorial style supervision where we pass our skills with children and families onto you. We offer either face to face (Cairns, Queensland) or telephone supervision (throughout Australia only).
The term supervision is open to definitional differences and there are many different types of supervision. Supervision is commonly understood in the social science field as one method of fieldwork education and staff development that enables counselors to acquire new professional and personal insights through their own life and work experiences.
The collective aim in supervising social science professionals is to assist them in establishing greater knowledge of the skills, theory, approaches and issues involved in clinical practice - the development of a praxis or framework of practice. In particular, in social work, external supervision is viewed as a conversational relationship where the talk is more than just talking to a colleague, the relationship between supervisee and supervisor becomes an enabler of unconditional learning, professional and self development. It is a mixture of supervision, consultation and personal reflection.
Helping establish best practice in other workers is sometimes referred to as mentoring, rather than supervision (supervision may indicate direct task organisation). What ever you call the process, the outcome is to increase your skill level and ability to work effectively with your client groups. Many workers have articulated a fear of supervision: a faulty belief that the supervisor will judge them and think they are inadequate. Supervision is not about judgement - supervision is about increasing your ability to be a fantastic worker who can draw on best practice to respond to and cope with all that a work day presents.
If you would like to have some supervision / mentoring through Imaginif, please make contact with Rebekah (psychologist) or Megan (Social Worker) through our contact page. We look forward to assisting you to develop into the best worker you can be.
Some sites of interest around social work supervision (Megan does also offer supervision to people with a psych degree and to other workers in the counselling children/family/sexual assault sector):
Fried social worker
Social Work world blog
Australian Psychological Society
Australian Association of Social Workers
Supervision and the clinical social worker
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