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Children’s Homes Quality Standards Partnership

Reflective Supervision Skills for Children’s Homes Supervisors,

Trainers’ notes.

Introduction

Audits and self-reports show that supervision is often task orientated and superficial in its reflection. It often does not get ‘below the surface’ of what is going on for the worker or for the child. The purpose of this training is to engage supervisors positively with the notion of reflective supervision and to equip them with skills and knowledge to deliver more reflective supervision.

As such the trainer must maintain a positive stance towards reflective practice, modelling skills, as well as creating a positive learning environment, where it is safe for people to actively participate and reflect on their practice.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Understand the ground rules necessary for reflective supervision
  • Know the difference between a blame and a learning culture and appreciate the value of a learning culture
  • Explore the barriers to reflective supervision in your workplace
  • Find solutions and opportunities for more reflective supervision
  • Learn about Gibbs’ Reflective Learning Cycle and how to apply it to supervision
  • Develop reflective supervision skills of: leading; setting boundaries; applying acceptance and empathy; active listening; asking open questions; being solution focussed; offering constructive challenge.
  • Application of learning to de-briefing after critical incidents
  • Understand the elements of a reflective culture
  • Action planning to establish improvements to the home’s reflective culture and practice.

Tips for the Trainer

There are full trainer’s notes attached to each slide. Use them. You can trust that the training will take participants on a journey from their current experience of supervision to a more knowledgeable and skilful approach to reflective supervision.

The training is designed as a one day event. However, there is a lot to get through and if participants have not had training on being supervisors previously, or if there are a lot of issues around supervision in the home(s) which may need to be aired, it will be ambitious to try to deliver this training in one day. If you are extending the training to be a 2 day event, think about the balance of the material and including a positive ending to each day.

You will need to have break-out spaces where participants can work in small groups.

The training is experiential and the trainer must model reflective (supervision) skills during the day(s). It will be useful to be familiar with the skills identified in the training beforehand and to reflect on how comfortable you are personally with them and how you might display them during the day. There are suggestions in the trainer’s notes accompanying the slides.

It is not surprising when reflective supervision does not happen. It isn’t an easy process to ‘get below the surface’, we are naturally defended against revealing our inner feelings or thoughts which we may judge as negative - doubts, fears, dislikes or perceived weaknesses. This training is designed to give participants the experience of being supported to feel safe to start reflecting on their own experiences as supervisors, positive and negative, become more conscious of what goes on between supervisor and supervisee, and to learn specific skills to support the reflective process. The trainer needs to know how to model these skills and ‘hold the space’ for the group to feel as safe as possible. It may be useful to have a trainer who is not part of the home’s line management structure, for example Registered Managers could swap this role with colleagues from other homes.

One aspect of holding the space is holding the boundary around the training. It may be that the home is used to having fluid and flexible boundaries around their own needs, to meet the needs of children. It will be helpful for the trainer to be sure there is time and space for this training to occur and for staff to be present throughout, without interruptions. It may be necessary to remind the participants, kindly and positively to come back promptly from breaks, stay focussed, resist interruptions etc. In this way you are modelling the value of this training as well as how to approach supervision time. The early exercise on setting ground rules is important for getting the group to buy into these agreements, but it may be hard for them to stick to it, if this has not been the culture of the home so far.

Trust: one important aspect of the training is to help supervisors to adopt a positive mind-set towards their supervisees; a necessary pre-condition if trust and reflection is to be established in supervision. This may not always be easy, natural or comfortable, and it is tempting for supervisors (and managers) when together to complain about their staff. Whilst some of this is necessary offloading, in this reflective supervision training, it is helpful for the trainer to keep a light tone about complaining. Respond with humour and acceptance and gently but firmly guide participants back towards finding a genuinely positive stance. For example, can you at least honestly say that you genuinely want this person to be able to do their best at work? Yes? OK, so let’s look at how best you can support them to do this, using reflective supervision.

It is important, also, to acknowledge that when all else fails it may be necessary to use performance improvement procedures and work with HR to find the changes necessary, maybe ultimately dismissal. As with behaviour support approaches with children, however, coercion should be the last resort, to use only when everything else has failed.

Slide 18 PACE and Acceptance: A really useful reflective supervision skill is to be able to offer acceptance to your supervisee, no matter how they are presenting. It is not the end of the conversation, but a great starting place, especially if you have a supervisee who you find difficult.

I have used the PACE model, created by Dan Hughes, child psychologist and therapist, to structure this discussion, but you could use another model which values acceptance, if you are not familiar with PACE, such as the Rogerian person-centred approach. The point is to help participants understand the positive impact and usefulness of showing acceptance of how their supervisee feels and thinks about an issue, before going on to explore what lies underneath, or what might need to change.

The trainer needs to have the skill to demonstrate or really explain what using acceptance is about and how to do it. If you are not confident about this, usingEmapthy could be practiced instead if this is more accessible to you. There is a good You Tube clip by Brene Brown demonstrating what an empathic response is, to support you.

If the group are concerned that acceptance is not enough if you need to challenge someone’s practice, then agree, and point out that this is just one aspect of supervision, not the whole story, but an important aspect that helps create the conditions in which you can go on to constructively challenge.

The later part of the training is about putting what participants have learnt into practice, through skills practice and action planning. Encourage participants to use this as real work time for them to work towards improving their delivery of reflective supervision.

Good Luck.

Consultant contact details

If you would like support to prepare for this training or pick up on issues following the training, it is possible for the consultant to provide training for trainers support. Please contact:

Margaret Davies, Director, Red Dragonfly Services Ltd

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or 0759 1181763

Handouts:

Reflection Self-Assessment Questionnaire

Open Questions

Case study for constructive challenge

Dos and Don’ts of Supervision from Research in Practice

Suggested programme

Suggested evaluation form