In a qualitative study of negative supervision, 13 master's and doctoral trainees were interviewed about a supervision experience that had a detrimental effect on their training. Many supervisors were described as not being invested in the relationship and as being unwilling to own their role in conflicts. Many trainees described being overworked without proper supervision, some felt expected to support their supervisors, and many underwent extreme stress and self-doubt. Most participants reported ongoing power struggles with angry supervisors, and most relied on peers, other professionals, and therapists for support. Qualitative themes were consistent with trainees' high scores on the Role Conflict and Role Ambiguity Inventory (M.E. Oik & M.L. Friedlander, 1992) and with their low ratings of their supervisors' attractiveness and interpersonal sensitivity on the Supervisory Styles Inventory (M.L. Friedlander & L.G. Ward, 1984).

With the intimate nature of the work, supervisees must face the inevitability of ambivalence, their reactions of hate as well as love, the presence of destructive as well as constructive forces, and the realization that we are all vehicles for one another's inner worlds.

To investigate the relation of training level to working alliance, 50 counselor-client dyads from three counseling agencies were surveyed. Counselors were grouped into three training levels: (a) novices, in their first practicum; (b) advanced trainees, in their second practicum through predoctoral internship; and (c) experienced counselors, postdoctoral staff at the agencies. After the third session, counselors and clients completed the Working Alliance Inventory to provide ratings of the bond, task, and goal dimensions of their alliances. Multivariate analyses yielded significant main effects for training level. Univariate analyses indicated no difference for bond but significantly higher ratings in the higher training levels for task and goal. Clients' ratings were highest at higher counselor training levels. However, advanced trainees' self-ratings were numerically lower than those of either novice or experienced counselors.

Eight female and 4 male supervisors identified by professional peers as highly competent were interviewed about experiences of conflict in supervision and their dependable strategies for managing it. Highly competent supervisors were open to conflict and interpersonal processing, willing to acknowledge shortcomings, developmentally oriented, and willing to learn from mistakes. They believed in creating strong supervisory alliances, discussing evaluation early on, modeling openness to conflict, and providing timely feedback. Dependable strategies included contextualizing conflicts in light of developmental and environmental factors, seeking consultation with colleagues, self-coaching, processing conflicts, accentuating supervisee strengths, interpreting parallel processes, and withdrawing from supervisee dynamics.

Eleven counseling psychology and counselor education academics were interviewed regarding their experiences of progressing from lower-or lower-middle-class backgrounds to college and, further, to academic positions. Grounded theory method was used for data analysis, and consensual qualitative research methods were used for triangulation and data presentation. Participants described experiences of hardship as children, obstacles to advancement, resources that enabled academic pursuits, and thwarted belonging needs in academic environments and original referent group settings. Bicultural and tricultural identity development were identified as central phenomena for participants. Implications regarding social class as an important aspect of multiculturalism are discussed.

Reflectivity in its most basic sense is focused contemplation and has been touted as an important skill for professionals in practice. As part of an effort to form an integrated theory of reflectivity as it occurs in clinical supervision, 5 experts in practitioner development were interviewed about the attributes of supervisee reflectivity. Respondents' statements from initial interviews were categorized and presented to respondents for discussion in a 2nd set of interviews. Grounded theory analysis (A. Strauss & J. Corbin, 1990) was used to derive a set of final categories. These categories included (a) casual conditions of new information and uncertainty; (b) intervening conditions of supervisee personality, supervisee cognitive capacity, and supervision environment; (c) the process of the supervisee's search for understanding of phenomena in the counseling session; and (d) change in the supervisee's perception, behavior, or long-term growth.1 Throughout this article, the terms reflection, reflecting, and reflectivity refer to an internal process of attention and thought rather than to a counselor's verbal response to a client. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

This article examines current literature on the pedagogy of counseling. The authors offer a critique of current counselor education practices and suggest constructivist methods for educating reflective practitioners.As counselor educators, we embrace and endorse a given set of knowledge content areas and competencies that are vital to counselor preparation. Students must be trained in basic interpersonal skills, a set of personality theories that pertain to practice, group processes, multicultural issues, career development, and ethics. In addition, students must also know how to read and evaluate research: they must undertake study in areas relevant to their preferred specializations, such as community, mental health, rehabilitation, and marriage and family counseling. Counselor educators work hard to ensure that content and practice bases are covered. We discuss accreditation standards and other measures of training quality at length: as a profession, we are dedicated to educating our students as thoroughly and responsibly as possible. The intent of this article is not to critique how well counselor educators cover our curriculum, but how well we teach our students.In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (1 993) spoke to the issue of inequality in teaching. According to Freire, oppressed people see themselves as ignorant and view the "professor" as the one who has the knowledge and to whom they must listen. Seldom do they realize that they too know things they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and men.

Audiotaped supervision sessions from 40 master's level counselor trainees and 40 field placement supervisors were used in a content analytic study of the relation of supervisor and trainee gender to supervisory discourse. The Penman Classification Scheme was used to rate the middle 15 min of supervision on power and involvement dimensions. Classification cells were aggregated to yield high-power, low-power, and high-involvement categories. Transformed proportional data and kappa scores from sequential analysis were used in two 2 × 2 (Gender × Role) multivariate analyses of variance to compare dyad types on speaker's use of message categories and patterns of discourse between speakers. Findings indicated that male and female supervisors reinforced female trainees' high-power messages with low-power, encouraging messages significantly less often than for male trainees. Female trainees responded to supervisor low-power, encouraging messages with high-power messages significantly less often than male trainees.