Peter Hawkins & Robin Shohet, Supervision in the Helping Professions

This book examines supervision across a range of professionals, including health professionals, social workers, psychotherapists, psychologists, and executive coaches. It provides a detailed overview of the supervisory process, including bilateral supervision, peer supervision, group supervision, and supervisory networks and cultures.

The authors define supervision as:

‘Supervision is a joint endeavour in which a practitioner, with the help of a supervisor, attends to their clients, themselves as part of their client-practitioner relationships and the wider systemic context, and by doing so improves the quality of their work, transforms their client relationships, continuously develops themselves, their practice and the wider profession’ (p.60).

The book relies on the seven-eyed model of supervision set out in the figure below.

This model of supervision involves a systematic methodology describing the move from a focus on the client to the supervisee, the supervisory relationship, the supervisor’s own processing and the progressive aspects of context and style. It provides a framework for the supervisee and the supervisor to examine supervision sessions and discuss altering the frame of focus. (Note that in other disciplines, practitioners are supervised throughout their career rather than only in the articling or early career context.)

Peter Hawkins & Robin Shohet, Supervision in the Helping Professions (England: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press, 2012).