Parallel Process in a Course on Counseling Supervision

The learning of supervision implies not only acquisition of formal knowledge but also changes in the learner. Because these changes cannot be completely specified at the outset, the way a supervisor learns must be through a mixture of experiential and didactic teaching. The dialectic between the “inner” and the “outer” learnings required for counselors to change their roles to becoming supervisors forms the substance of this article. Early in the course, the class was fascinated by the seeming inevitability of “parallel process” issues between supervisor, trainee, and client. In the second half of the year, the beginning supervisors took on a new group of trainees and learned the importance of having a developmental model to guide their work. The bias in the course as a whole was that all learning requires a change in relationship, that supervision needs to be understood developmentally, and that it is best to treat beginning supervisors and trainees as creative geniuses.