Supervision? What is it?

In this episode I am joined by the lovely Claire, Practice Educator of the year 2021, and the author of "The Supervision Chair Model". Between us we talk you through the two types of supervision on placement and Claire will introduce her concept of the Supervision Chair for you to potentially use on placement.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello and welcome back to surviving social work training. Today's episode is especially for social work students, whether you're on placement or you're about to start, and you just don't know what supervision is meant to look like or how you're supposed to use it. Supervision is one of those things we talk about all the time in social work, but it often isn't properly explained at the beginning. Students can find themselves sitting in supervision wondering what they're meant to bring, what they're being assessed on, or whether what they're doing is right. So today we're going to explain that and break it all down for you. I'm very, very pleased, very excited to be joined by Claire today, who is or who was, I should say, uh, practice educator of the year in 2021. She's an author and she's the creator for the supervision chair model, and she's going to be explaining that later on in the episode. But together we're going to kind of talk through what supervision is about on placement, the different types of supervision you're likely to experience, and how supervision can support you to think, reflect, and develop your professional judgment. So, what actually is supervision? Before we talk about any tools or models, it's really important to start with the basics because many students arrive on placement and they've never experienced supervision before. In social works, supervision is described as a regular planned space where you can reflect on your practice, be supported, and make well-informed decisions using your professional judgment. Simply, supervision isn't just about checking your work, it's a space to stop, think, reflect. I know it's that word again, and make sense of what you're doing and how the work is affecting you. The student supervision should be a place where you can talk through cases and learning experiences, reflect on what's gone well, what feels difficult, ask any questions without feeling silly. Link your theory, values, and your practice, and get emotional support with the impact that your work will have on you. And if you've ever thought I don't actually know what I'm meant to use supervision for, you are not alone. And that's exactly why this episode exists. When you're in placement, there's normally two types of supervision. One reason supervision can feel confusing is because it comes in more than one form. The first one is case-based or on-site supervision, which tends to focus on your day-to-day work and your cases. The second is your practice educator supervision, which focuses more on learning, reflection, development, feedback, and professional growth. They feel different, they have different purposes, and that's completely normal. So we're going to start off with case-based or on-site supervision in a bit more detail. Okay. So I want to spend a bit of time on this because I think this is the type of supervision that students can often feel the most anxious about. The session should begin with a check-in. That might be a simple question like, How are you doing this week? or how have things been since we last met? That check-in really matters because how you're feeling affects how you think, how you prioritize, and how you make decisions. After that, your supervision will usually involve working through your cases one by one. For each case, you might be asked, What's happening at the moment? What do you understand of the situation that you're presented with? What you've already done, and what you think needs to happen next. And this is a really important point for students to hear clearly. Good case-based supervision is not about being told what to do. The aim is not for your supervisor to say, do this, then do that, then do this next. Instead, good supervision should develop your thinking. So your on-site supervisor should be asking things like, What do you think the main issues are here? What options have you considered? What feels like the next sensible step? What makes this case feel tricky? No, you're not expected to have the perfect answer. What matters? Is it your thinking and beginning to explain your reasoning? The role of the on-site supervisor is to guide and support your decision making, not to take over or make decisions for you. Otherwise, how else are you going to ever prove that you're an autonomous worker? They might help to guide you to think about risk, law, policy, or timescales. They might challenge your thinking or help you to slow down, and they might ask you to consider things from another angle that you hadn't considered. That's not criticism, that's learning. Case-based supervision is where you start to move from what should I do to this is what I think I should do, and this is why. And it's really important to say this clearly: you are not expected to know everything. Supervision is exactly where uncertainty belongs, it's where you bring the cases you feel unsure about, the ones that feel stuck, and the ones that are keeping you awake. Though, if cases are keeping you awake at night, that in itself is worrying. Okay? Because you should not be in a situation where cases are keeping you awake at night. In that sense, you are not being emotionally contained in the way you should, and there is something seriously going wrong with your supervisions on placement. If you try to pretend everything is fine in a supervision, you're likely to miss all opportunities to learn. So at this point, as we've talked a little bit about case-based supervision, I'm going to introduce the lovely Claire, who is all who's going to talk about practice educator supervision. So case-based supervision tends to sit alongside practice educators' supervision, um, but it often has quite a different focus when you look at it. I I guess Claire, I wonder if you could talk to me a bit and obviously to the listeners about what the difference is with a practice educators supervision, um, how it complements what the case-based supervision does, but how it actually looks more towards development for the student.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Yeah, yeah. So I guess maybe firstly to say uh in case people don't know, a practice educator is an experienced social worker who's undertaken additional training and teaching and supervision. And your supervision meeting, your supervision session with a practice educator is really a space for you to, for students to apply theory and use that to help make sense of situations and people. So, in terms of casework that you might be doing, you might bring an example of that to your practice educator, and a practice educator would help you think about what theories might have something to say about this person or this situation. So you'll be applying theory, thinking about how how do you actually use theory well in your work with people. I guess another big part of practice educator supervision is learning about yourself and your reactions to other people and situations. So there's quite a lot of discussion about impact of the student's own life experiences, um, how that impacts the lens through which we all see the world, and doing some exploration in supervision with a practice educator about those things because they impact on the way we work with people. I guess also exploring values and what guides you in the work is a big part of what a practice educator might help you reflect on and develop your thinking around using reflective models to explore thoughts and feelings and analysis of your work and plans for what you might do next. Um, and then there's the there's the element of assessment and feedback, which is a big part of our practice education role, isn't it? So the practice educator will provide feedback to the student. That might be feedback from direct observations, it might be feedback from uh experiences in supervision or from reflective writing, and and part of the practice educator's role is to help the student learn from feedback. Um and also, of course, supervision with a PE is part of the student's assessment. So the practice educator is going to be sharing their assessment of your progress, assessing you against the PCF domains and the social work England standards. So I suppose if you agree, Donna, there's a there's a bigger focus on theory and assessment and that personal element of reflection than probably there might be in your casework supervision strand. Do you feel?

SPEAKER_01 9:40

I would agree. I'm I think one thing that I've found often seems to surprise students is how much a practice education supervision can ask about how they are feeling and not just about what they're doing, but actually what's going on for them outside of placement. Because I think sometimes that they'll almost think, you know, why are you asking me about what's happening in my private life? Should we just be focusing on the work? And obviously, the two are connected. If there's things going on in somebody's private life, it's it's obviously going to have an impact on you in your setting and you in your placement or how you're approaching your work. Um, and I know when we've talked previously, you've talked a lot about the importance of kind of building an honest and kind of trusting relationship and supervision. Um, and we we need to do that really quickly when it comes to kind of getting to know a shoe. We don't we don't have very long to kind of get that open relationship where somebody can feel that they can talk to us about stuff that might be triggering for them because that's something we have to consider if we don't know things that have gone on in their private life and then we're sending them out to situations that could be a trigger for them, that can be really difficult. Is it could you talk a little bit more about um why that relationship matters and why those kind of early conversations that we have in placement are so important, Claire?

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Yeah, yeah. I guess one of the things we know about relationships in in general, be that a supervisory relationship or a relation, a working relationship with the service user, is the more that you can develop honesty and trust and open communication in a relationship, the more successful it is. And as you said, we have 70 to 100 days, depending on the level, to give a student the best possible opportunity on placement for success and supervision is a big part of that. Um we really want it to work well for the student, but what we know is it works better if the relationship between the PE and the student is a successful one, is safe. Um, if the student feels safe enough to explore challenges that have happened in placement work or feel safe enough to say, I'm having a really bad day, and this is the way it impacted on me when I went to see this service user. And in order to get the learning from our own reflection, we really need to feel safe and secure in a relationship, just the same as our service users need to feel as safe and secure as possible with us. So um, and we don't have long to do that. So really starting early on in developing a rapport, trust, safety, getting to know each other, and we're not saying this is just one-sided, obviously there's a there's a professional boundary, but we're expecting your practice educator to be open and honest with the student, not just the other way around. Um so the earlier we can develop rapport, trust, safety, getting to know each other, it helps the practice educator understand the student as a person and a learner, and that makes it easier for the practice educator to meet the student's needs and for the learning to be successful on placement, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

And I guess that's where supervision agreements can come in. But supervision agreements would I'm I mean, within the organisation that I work in, I know that there are supervision arrangements, and I'm sure that happens, or supervision agreements, I'm sure that happens with lots of placements across the country where that is part and parcel of the portfolio that the student has to prepare at the beginning. Um so for me, I think it could that can some sometimes fall below expectations, if I'm quite honest. I think it can become quite bureaucratic. Um they're transactional in the way that they work. I I think it doesn't necessarily, I think, always adapt itself very well to being um kind of meaningful, I guess, for the individual. I don't I think, like I say, the kind of bureaucratic, very kind of form tick boxy method that we're kind of given to do our supervision agreements um from which sit outside of your practice learning agreements that you'll have with students, but your actual supervision agreements are are kind of fixed. I think they've been around since the day dot. They don't seem to have kind of come to you know forward. It's all about confidentiality, it's all kind of legal blurb, and it doesn't really kind of do what it needs to do, really, for people. Um I know, and I know that you know, this is probably part and parcel of what brought up your idea around the supervision chair, which you are the author of the supervision chair. Um, and I know that when we've talked about this previously, you've said that that came to you from your own experience of supervision and you, you know, needing to find something that perhaps worked outside of the traditional kind of array agreements, um, but that would fit better with the students that we're sort of supporting. So can you tell me a bit about your thinking behind that around you know how that might create a secure base, relationship-based practice, why you felt that that was important, what was the theory and the thinking behind it?

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Yeah, so yeah, one of the ways that we really um begin to get to know a student is to um help create and and help create an understanding of supervision is often to create a supervision agreement, as you say. That's a conversation between the student and the practice educator in our case, and it's written down in a document. Traditionally, it might include where and when supervision might happen, who might do what, etc., confidentiality, that sort of thing. And they are useful, but many of them tend to lend themselves, as you say, to this tick box approach, and then the document, once it's completed, is filed away somewhere, never to be seen again. And I guess I always have felt a little bit uncomfortable about that because there doesn't always, you know, it doesn't seem that it's a great deal of help in terms of developing the relationship, which is the bit that I'm really interested in. So I wanted to find a different way to do a supervision agreement that was more creative, that was visual, because lots of people now are visual learners, and was relationship-based, and would importantly continue to be part of the supervision throughout the placement. So it's not just something that you do and then you forget about it. And I really wanted something that would help promote shared discussions that aim to develop safety and knowledge of each other and trust, which we know, as we've said, are really important in supervision. And so thinking about those things, I I reflected on my own experience of supervision, particularly trying to put myself in the position of many of our students who come to us and have never had supervision before. And when I came into social care work, I came from an education background and supervision wasn't even a thing, I didn't know anything about it. And my first manager, who um, when I write about the supervision chair in the book, I call Elaine. So Elaine was my first social care manager, and she was absolutely amazing. And my first experience of supervision was absolutely everything that I would have wanted it to have been. Um she this was in the days when you had your own office, and so she had her own office, and you'd trip up to her office, it was upstairs to go for your supervision. And she had two comfortable chairs in the corner and a little coffee table in the middle, and used to sit down in this chair. She was always on time. It never it very, very rarely got cancelled. She'd sit down and she'd always begin supervision in the same way, and she used to begin it with what she called personal supervision, and she'd talk about how you are and you know what what was going on for you, and then she'd move on to the casework supervision. But I used to arrive in her office sometimes for supervision, very stressed and overwhelmed. You know, I was I was uh really young at the time, and um, I used to arrive in the chair thinking I really don't know what I'm doing, I don't understand anything, I feel really overwhelmed, and she just had a way of making that okay. And by the time I left her chair, I felt like I understood a bit about myself, I'd learnt a bit, I understood what I was then going to go off and do in my work with service users, I felt contained, I felt calmer, I felt more confident. And and of course, it wasn't anything about the chairs that we were sitting in, it was about what Elaine was doing. Um, and when I really thought about that and I thought, so theoretically, what was she doing then? Why was that so successful? And thinking about it, she was a secure base for me. So if you think about Bowlby's concept of a secure base and attachment theory, the idea is your secure base is your safe haven. And for children, we hope that's their main caregiver, but you go to your safe haven from the stresses of the outside world and they help you to feel safe, and then you feel able to go out into the outside world again and explore and learn, and it just makes things feel more manageable. And that's exactly what she used to do for me. She was my secure base at work. And then when I thought a bit more about secure base, um there's a model called the Team as a Secure Base by Bigot, Ward, Cook, and Schofield 2017. And they talk about five important factors in a secure base when you're working in a team. So think about student and practice educator as a team, and they talk about availability is really important. Your supervisor needs to be available for you. Sensitivity is really important, they need to be sensitive to you and your needs and your feelings. Acceptance is really important, they need to accept who you are, why you are that way, what your needs are, etc. Cooperation, so you need to be doing it together, and membership, you need to feel a bit of a sense of belonging, like I belong in this supervision chair, this is okay. Um, so when I thought about the supervision chair, what I've tried to do with each part of this sort of metaphorical chair, if you like, is focus on those factors. And then, of course, um, finally, as you say, relationship-based practice is a big part of this. And you're probably familiar with a model by McCulgan and McMullen, which is 2000 and something, might be 17. Um, but they write about the stages of relationship building and they talk about engagement, which is where you build a rapport with someone, negotiate, which is when you agree what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, enable, which is when you enable change and learning, and ending. Um, and they talk about how important it is to value the end of a relationship, but also the end of everything we do. Everything we do has a beginning and an ending, and that includes supervision, and how important it is to pay attention to the way in which we end. So, again, the supervision chair as a tool helps us do those aspects of relationship building.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

So, I think it would be really good if if you were happy to talk the listeners through the different stages of the supervision chair and the different parts of it, and and because I think, and I am going to try and Get some kind of link to the template because Claire has kindly said that she's happy for that to be shared, so there will be some link to the template somehow in the hemisphere, or in you know, that I'll try and get that sorted out. But um is it all right for you to go ahead and and sort of talk us through what the supervision chair looks like and and how that and how that works?

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Yeah, so let's try and make sense of it because I'm aware it can appear quite abstract when you're talking about it. So um, so to start with, the supervision chair, um, it it's like it's a supervision agreement, it's going to be written down or it's going to be drawn out on a piece of paper. But you're building an imaginary chair that you're going to sit in at each supervision, and each suit each section of the chair represents a different part of a discussion about how supervision is going to work, what you need from it, how it's going to help you get to know each other. Now you can draw this out on a big piece of paper, you can use the template if that I've created if you're not, you know, if you feel like that suits you better. You can make a 3D model. So I had a student who made a 3D model of the supervision chair with Lego. You can take to supervision a photograph of your favourite chair at home, you can find an online image of a chair that you look think looks really comfortable. So it's the discussion that's the most important thing, but it can be really helpful to have a visual representation of a chair in front of you, or use the template which takes you through each stage of the chair. So you're building this supervision agreement from the bottom up. So you're starting at the bottom of the chair, so you start with the chair legs. Now the chair legs sort of represent availability. If you think about a chair, when you walk into a room and go and to go and sit down on a chair, you want it to have strong legs that are going to hold you up. So you want the chair to be available, you want it to be roughly in the same place so you know where it is, and you want the legs nice and strong so you can sit in it and it won't collapse on the floor. That's what we want for supervision. We want it to be strong, that it will hold you up, that it's going to be in the same sort of place every time. So the chair legs represent availability in terms of secure base, and the sorts of discussion that you have when you're thinking about the chair legs is what do you actually need as a student from me, your practice educator, to feel that supervision is available, it's stable, it'll hold you up, it's predictable. So, what are the sorts of things that work for you in terms of those things? What and and of course, if that's the first time you've been asked that question, you might think, My God, I actually don't know. The skill of your practice educator is unpicking that and thinking about well, it's an opportunity to talk about having protected time, it being planned in advance, you know, where do you like to do the supervision? Is it online? Is it in person? Who's going to send the invites if it's online? What happens if it's cancelled? If it's cancelled, then how do I know when it's come when it's going to be replaced? And what do I need for someone to feel they're available? So I had a student once that said we were doing online supervision at the time, and she said to me, Well, to feel like you're available, um, you will have your camera on, won't you, when we do supervision? Really sensible question, because you know, some people might not have their camera on. So for her, I would be so much more available if I was looking at her over the screen. I'm so much, we're usually so much more available if we're not typing on our laptop during supervision. So, uh, although that might not bother somebody, so it's an opportunity to have those discussions. And these are starter questions. Your practice educator would take that a bit further with you. So, your chair legs, all about what do I need for this to feel strong, predictable, and stable? Then we move on to the chair seat. Um, so I usually talk at this stage about the fact that we're gonna sit together, student and practice educator, for 70 to 100 days, and it's important that we feel as comfortable as we can because we're gonna have to talk about complex, challenging things, we're gonna have to have some personal discussions, we're gonna have to have some understanding of each other so that we can do that. So the C is really about acceptance and membership in terms of secure base. How can we accept each other? How can we feel like we are working in this together and belong in this situation and feel comfortable in it, as comfortable as we can. So, the sorts of things we might discuss at this stage are what do you uh what do we need to know about each other so that we can sit comfortably together? So, what do we what what do I need to know about you as a student? What are the important things that are going to help me understand you as a student? How could we learn more about each other on this placement journey? So, this is a really good opportunity to think about what things can we do in future supervisions that are going to help us to get to know each other so that we can talk openly and more comfortably about things. What do we need to acknowledge about the seat of power and privilege? So, one of the things that students often find understandably difficult on placement is the practice educator has the power to pass or fail the student on placement. The practice educator has power that comes with assessment, with the assessment role, and that can feel really uncomfortable and it can make students worried about naturally about what do I say to this person because this person is assessing me. So just having those conversations about actually what our what hour, what are our different powers and privileges in this situation? Because students do have power, um, but and they do have the privilege of being a learner and having a bit more time and those sorts of things. But this is also where your social graces come in. And if anyone listening isn't sure about what social graces are, um you can Google them. They're by John Burnham, but they are basically it's the idea that we can all think about our own identity in relation to different aspects of our identity, like our gender, our geography, where we come from, our age, our class, our culture, our education, our employment, our spirituality, those sorts of things. And so at this point in the supervision chair, there's some suggested questions that the practice educator might talk to the student about in terms of social graces. So if I just give you one, for example, um do any of our social graces provide us with more power or privilege? So, for example, has one of us got white privilege and the other one hasn't? And in that case, how might that impact on our working together? Um, how might uh if one person, if one person is female and the other person is male, how might that impact on the way we interact in supervision? What's our story? What's our narrative? What's our history with gender? How might that impact on the way that we uh work together? How might we manage and challenge and conflict? What's the student story with conflict? What's the student story with challenge? Um, I had an interesting discussion with a practice educator the other day about um what's the student story with mistakes? What do mistakes mean? Because mistakes are something we all do and we hopefully develop learning from them. But if you have a feeling about blame and shame and terror around mistakes, how might that impact on the way your your practice educator needs to give you feedback? So all those sorts of discussions sit with the chair, with the seat of the chair, things like your values, your beliefs, your work experiences, how have they impacted on you as a person? So it's that real bit about acceptance and belonging and sitting comfortably with each other. And I can appreciate as I'm saying all this, I'm thinking for a student that's never done a placement before, they're probably thinking, Oh my god, I've got to talk about all those things. No one's going to be forced to talk about those things, but your practice educator will encourage you to think about and talk about those things because to be a really reflective, good social worker in the future, it's really important that you understand yourself and the impact of self on the way we view the world and interact with other people. They're not doing it because they're nosy and they want a pry into your life, they're doing it to help you become a good social worker. So then you move up to the arms of the chair. Um, so this is about sensitivity, really. It's a bit like thinking about the arms of a chair, giving you a hug, holding you emotionally, supporting you emotionally. So it's that sort of aspect of supervision, really. Um, and we expect our practice educators to show some sensitivity about students' emotions and feelings, just the same as we would want the student to do that for the practice educator. So, this is around what does the student need to feel supported and accepted and emotionally contained? What works for you as a person? Um, where else do you get your support or your emotional containment from? For example, if we're working with a student who's just moved away from maybe their family in order to go to university, then actually maybe they might be feeling that they've lost quite a bit of their support network that might impact on the way they feel in placement. And so that would be something that would be really important to talk about. So the practice educator understood that. So, how will we know if you feel supported in placement? How will we know if you feel emotionally contained? What might I see as a practice educator if you feel uncontained, unsupported? What might that look like? Have you had times when that's happened before? And how did you deal with them? What do I need to know as your practice educator to try and help be as emotionally containing and supportive as possible? And there are additional questions the practice educators can ask there. Some people like some of the sort of visual more visual questions, like, you know, imagine the arms of this chair were a colour and a fabric, what colour or fabric would they be? And why is that why does that represent comfort to you? You know, so there are different ways of sort of helping the um discussion be more creative if uh people feel that's helpful. So then you're moving upwards to the back of the chair. So if you think about the back of your chair, it helps you sit up straight and pay attention and stay engaged and concentrate. Um, and so this part of the chair is really about how are we both going to stay engaged in supervision? How are we both going to sit up, pay attention, keep with each other for an hour and a half meeting discussing these things? What helps us to concentrate? So I suppose in a traditional supervision agreement, this might be the sort of ground rules bit, but um, so it's a bit about it's just like what helps you to stay focused? What helps you to keep paying attention? What's your learning style? What's your preferred way of doing an hour and a half meeting? Do you like to do that in person? Do you like to have a break? Do you need a drink and a snack with you? You know, what are the things that really help you? What's your concentration span like? What are your learning needs in terms of paying attention and having quite a complex discussion for an hour and a half? What's helped you previously to do that? Um, what barriers might there be for us in both pay and attention? So things like you know, if you're expecting a call because you've got a family member in hospital, then actually you just need to be able to say that in supervision and say it's really gonna help me to concentrate if I can just leave my phone on the table turned on because I might have an emergency that I need to go to. Um, so just being really clear, you know, I've got a really bad headache today, so I'm gonna need to just drink a lot of water, you know. I mean, things that actually what helps you to pay attention and keep focused in the supervision.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

And that can be and that can be really practical things as well. So I can remember with students I've sort of said, you know, we both make sure we have a we before the start of the supervision. It might sound like really base level, but let's make sure we've both had a wee, let's make sure that we've both got a drink handy. Yeah. For someone like me as a practice educator who's ADHD, don't let me sit facing a window because otherwise I am old as a squirrel. So you know, and and and I have to do things like I have to put if it's an online one, my teens has to go do not disturb so that no one can interrupt me. I have to switch my emails off so that the emails don't ping up because I don't want that distraction while I'm in the middle of a supervision. So it's kind of a there's a lot of kind of practicalities around it as well as kind of the more theoretical thought process behind it.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Absolutely, absolutely, that's right. Yeah, and then so you've got your chair made now, you've done the legs, the seat, the arms, the back, but you've got to get in and out of this chair. So this is an opportunity to talk about starting and ending rituals and routines for supervision. So, rituals and routines tend to make things predictable, so they they indicate a bit of safety. You know how your practice educator is going to begin, and you know how you're gonna end. So you know how my supervision always begins in this way and it always ends in this way. It's a really helpful concept for working with service users going on visits. You know, it's really disconcerting if you never know quite when the session's going to end or how it ends, and someone ends in a different way each time. So this is an opportunity, uh, and this relates to cooperation and working together in terms of the um secure base. Um, so this is an opportunity to talk about what activity or ritual might the student like to do at the start of each supervision and at the end of each supervision. So, and if again, if as a student you're listening to this and you're thinking, Well, I've got no idea what she's talking about, what on earth would I want to do? Your practice educator will give you some ideas to choose from if you're to get your thinking, if you if you don't know. But some of the things that some people choose to do are, for example, start each supervision by bringing a pre-prepared uh online image or postcard or picture about how they're feeling in placement right now, and you do a beginning reflection based on that picture. Um, some people might like to start supervision by talking about their most positive moment that they've had in placement in the in the week since they've seen the practice educator. So there are lots of different uh ideas uh that you can use. And how do you end supervision? So, you know, uh, some people uh one of the ideas that I've written about and that I use quite a lot is a supervision treasure box or a supervision achievements box. So at the end of each supervision, um I ask the student for their um their piece of treasure. What have you done? What have you done on placement that you've really loved that you really want to hold on to, or what have you done, what big achievement have you done? We write it down and they pop it in the box, and at the end of placement, they take away their social work achievements box or their social work treasure box. Um, some people might just like to use a brief reflective model at the end of supervision. Some people might want to talk about what they're going to do at the weekend. But this in this part of the discussion, you're beginning to set up those arrangements for how you're going to start your supervisions and how you're going to end it. It's also an opportunity to think about when you have left the supervision chair, how are you going to remember the main points from supervision? So, what suits your learner best? So, who's writing the minutes, who's writing the action points, how are you going to know what you've got to do? How are you going to remember the things that you've spoken about in supervision? And different things again work for different people, but so thinking about when I've left this chair, how am I taking the learning with me? How am I remembering what I've got to do next? Um, so yeah, so just thinking about those things and setting them up, and you may want to try some different ideas first and see what suits you, where what's going to sit in terms of moving forward with the placement. And then sorry, go no, go on. And then, well, finally, I guess the bit about keeping the chair present in supervision throughout the placement is the importance of reviewing the chair. So if you think about this in a visual way, if you want to keep this chair comfortable, the cushions need to be plumped up. You know, you might want to shake and vac the or vanish or whatever the chair to keep it clean and tidy. You know, it might need a leg mending every now and then. So reviewing the chair is a really important aspect that happens at every supervision moving forward. So every supervision moving forward, you might ask questions like, how comfortable did the supervision chair feel today? What do we need to pay more attention to? So just thinking about all those aspects of the chair, which ones have we started to forget about? Which ones do we need to concentrate a bit more on? Are we feeling that we actually need to sort of think about our social graces a bit more? Or we need to think about increasing the level of support and emotional containment that you're getting in in placement? So, what could we do next time to pay more attention to those particular aspects of the chair? Is there anything in terms of the chair that feels wobbly that doesn't feel like it used to? Is there something that you're sensing about supervision that doesn't quite feel right? And if so, you know, what will we do about it? So not only is that important in terms of carrying it through throughout the whole of the placement, but it's also important in things like midway, when you get to midway point, let's just get our supervision chair out again on that big piece of paper or the Lego model or whatever, and let's just review where we're at with this. Um, so having a sort of formal review is important, but also just doing those questions each week about how is this feeling? What could we do differently? What could we do better? What do we need to pay more attention to? And that's I guess that's the bit about keeping it alive. Um and yeah, so does that make sense, Doctor?

SPEAKER_01 42:33

No, that absolutely makes sense. And I was gonna say, in terms of the kind of getting in and out of the chair, I actually think that um that's the bit where I've actually found the opportunity to be most creative as a practice educator in the sense of, you know, when it comes to my students, I'll say, right, okay, we're not just gonna say how are you because we're gonna worry that there's we're gonna get a monosyllabic answer and we're not actually gonna get to the hard and fast of what is actually going on for you right now. So let's bring in an abstract, let's bring in a meme, a picture, a film, a song, a poem, what you know, whatever kind of thing you want to pick. And I've had people where they've picked a particular theme all the way through, and there's been a soundtrack essentially created for their whole placement. I've I've got a student currently who's picking pieces of artwork, and then she describes those pieces of artwork. I've got another student who all of her um getting in the chairs, there've been different pictures of her cats in different positions to illustrate how she's feeling. Um, and I think that's a really kind of it tells you a bit about the person as well, what they've what they're actually choosing, and it gives you an opportunity to rather than have this kind of very closed questioning, very um, you know, transactional. How are you? I'm fine, and trying to unpick that a bit more, which can be really, really difficult with somebody who finds it quite difficult to open up. Having that abstract makes it really easy to kind of open it up. And the other thing. thing that I've found really useful that I've used with a lot of my students is having takeaway from the session. So the getting out of the chair is around, you know, what are you going to take away from today? What is the thing that you're going to go away and you're going to think about more? What's you know what's surprised you potentially you know what's made you think in this supervision that you might not have thought about previously. And so that's something that I really like about the chair that much as we're kind of doing very much that containment and that you know making sure that a person is sitting comfortably in that chair, it's that kind of almost setting them up to allow them to be creative in the kind of predictability of how they're going to enter and how they're going to leave seems to work really well in practice.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Yeah yeah and creativity in social work is really is a really important skill isn't it um it's really important in terms of creative thinking it really links to reflective abilities it really improves our ability to be reflective yeah having those more abstract abstract creative activities really improves creative thinking so it's good from that point of view too.

SPEAKER_01 45:08

I think it also helps in the sense of the student who I have who's looking at pieces of artwork that I've asked her to really really dissect and analyse what is it about that particular painting what is it that's actually telling me what's going on for you right now and I think it's actually helped to develop her more analytical thinking in terms of her looking and actually exploring really deeply rather than just looking at it on a surface level exploring deeply what that means to her because we all have we all look for a different lens you've said that yourself we all view things through a different lens we're all coming at this from different having different intersectional you know traits around us of coming from different backgrounds having you know different ages everything else different experiences but when you can actually get somebody to really really analyse a picture to actually explain what that means to them because we could because it could mean completely different to us. So we you know that really does help to explore their analytical brain I guess in kind of getting them to really examine why they've chosen that piece and sometimes I think there's even been surprises for the student in terms of oh I hadn't seen it like that.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Yeah yeah absolutely yeah and I think that um that also links to just popping back to the social graces questions on the um the part of the chair that's about how do we sit together with similarity and difference is that you know what you've described is yes we see the world through different lenses that's influenced by our childhood and our life experiences and our different intersectional characteristics. And to get to know each other you really need to be exploring and thinking about those things together don't you because as a practice educator it is so important to understand your student because no one person is the same and no student is the same. So and we don't have very long to assess and support somebody so when we're really exploring how those things impact on our lens on our bias on our assumptions those are really really important skills for social work. So I guess the other message to give is that everything I think everything that we talk about when we create a supervision chair is absolutely transferable to social work practice because all of the skills that you're trying to develop and the conversations that you're trying to practice are very very similar to those that you'll be having with service users in terms of understanding people for who they are and what life experiences they've had. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:56

No that that's been really really brilliant and I'm sure that the people listening are going to have found that really useful like I say I would I will look to try and get the template that you've kindly offered on the on attached to the podcast in whatever way I can manage to do that with my little limited techie knowledge I will do my best to get that in place. But for now Claire can I thank you so much for coming and speaking on the podcast I really appreciate you coming and talking to us about the supervision chair and sharing your experiences it'll I'm sure it's going to be really useful to the listeners. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me Donna thank you so thank you so much for joining me on today's podcast and I'd like to thank again Claire for coming on today. The next episode I'm going to be talking to a student who's experienced challenges that most students wouldn't have to experience on placement due to her disability. However I think her story is incredibly aspirational and I think it's really a really positive thing for you to hear that people from all places in their life and with all sorts of differing needs can enter this wonderful world we call social work. So I'm gonna go for now take care look after yourself and keep going out there and doing what you're doing because you're doing great thanks a lot by