The efficacy of supervision in training of psychotherapists is discussed in relation to (a) trainees' attitudes, beliefs, and skills, (b) trainee's performance in the therapist role, (c) interactional process events in supervision and psychotherapy, and, (d) client change. Although investigations to date suggest the potential of supervision for teaching advanced skills of psychotherapy, few studies exist that examine directly the relation of therapist performance and client change to supervision. There are virtually no studies that compare the efficacy of supervision to other training methods. If supervision is to remain an integral part of training, then standardized training manuals, analogous to those in psychotherapy, need to be developed.

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.

Researchers interviewed 17 psychotherapists in training in an analogue study of psychotherapists' use of broadly defined diversity factors in conceptualizing clients and cases. Each therapist watched two 5-minute staged videotapes of clients who varied along dimensions of race and ethnicity, age, and gender. Each acting client described problems in an initial psychotherapy interview, and then participant therapists responded to questions. Participants demonstrated varying levels of multicultural competence. Many exhibited knowledge in the areas of culture-specific values, and family and gender roles; awareness of their own cultural background and its effects on the therapeutic relationship; and skills in treatment planning, including assessment of levels of acculturation and culturally appropriate treatment methods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).