The supervisor is not responsible for a successful supervision session;
the supervisor is responsible for creating a reflective space”. Michael Paterson, Perth workshop 2024
In my supervision work, I place particular value on reflective supervision as a way of supporting clinicians to think deeply about both their work and themselves. Rather than focusing on quick answers or expert solutions, this approach creates space to slow down, reflect together, and allow understanding to unfold. The reflections below outline how I understand and practise this style of supervision.
Reflective supervision is grounded in the belief that lasting learning requires reflection on one’s experience. In this style of supervision, the supervisee is invited to bring their lived clinical work into the room, where it is explored collaboratively and in depth so that new learning can emerge. Reflection, here, is understood as the capacity to hold prior experience in mind, in the present, in order to shape future understanding and action.
This approach draws on recognised models of adult learning, particularly experiential learning, in which learning unfolds through a cycle of experience, reflection, meaning making, and application. Although each phase of this cycle is important, reflective supervision focuses especially on the often-neglected function of reflection itself.
In supervision, there is often a natural pull to move quickly from describing experience to seeking explanations or solutions. This can reflect a wish to reduce uncertainty or anxiety – for supervisees and supervisors alike. Supervisees may seek reassurance or instruction, while supervisors may feel pressure to occupy the ‘expert’ role.
Reflective supervision takes a different stance. It values staying with uncertainty long enough for fresh understanding to emerge. By slowing the process and thinking together before taking action, new perspectives and emotional clarity become possible in ways that advice alone cannot provide.
Reflective supervision recognises that clinical understanding takes multiple forms, including tacit, reflective, declarative, and procedural knowing. While these do not need elaboration here, it is useful to be aware of them and to know that reflective supervision supports moving between these ways of knowing rather than privileging one over another. Over time, integrating these different forms of knowing strengthens clinical confidence, flexibility, and depth in practice.
In practice, reflective supervision entails giving careful attention to clinical material, emotional responses, and relational processes. Supervisees are invited to speak openly about their work, including uncertainty, mixed feelings, and moments of difficulty. Whether in group or individual supervision, priority is given to shared reflection – noticing, wondering, sensing, and thinking together, and considering different perspectives, before moving toward conceptual understanding and action-planning.
Leading trainers in reflective supervision, including Michael Carroll, Robin Shohet and Michael Paterson, urge supervisors to consider reflective practice as a way of being that permeates both professional and personal life. This practice calls for a sustained willingness to examine one’s work and oneself with curiosity and vulnerability, remaining open always to new learning, change and growth.
It is not about arriving at certainty or expertise as quickly as possible. It is about creating the conditions in which thinking, feeling, and clinical judgement can deepen over time. I see this form of supervision as a shared and evolving process, one that supports not only the work but also the person doing the work, and I value engaging in this reflective practice together.
This overview reflects my clinical practice and teaching in reflective supervision, informed by experiential learning models and the work of Michael Carroll, Robin Shohet, Peter Hawkins, Michael Paterson, and other authors in the field of supervision.
Maggie Down
Counselling on Stirling
