Enhancing adult learning in clinical supervision

For decades, across almost every training site, clinical supervision has been considered "central to the development of skills" in psychiatry. The crucial supervisor/supervisee relationship has been described extensively in the literature, most often framed as a clinical apprenticeship of the novice to the master craftsman. This approach fails to directly incorporate adult-learning theory (ALT), despite a clear literature supporting its superiority.

In this article, the author describes the basic principles of ALT, reviewing the limitations of current supervisory practice from the ALT perspective. He then describes system insights gleaned from elements of the manufacturing process and integrates them into a model that enhances ALT-informed approaches to clinical supervision that can be utilized in all settings.

Although there are clear benefits of ALT and the proposed "pull" manufacturing management-informed approaches to supervision, there are several anticipated areas of likely resistance: the issues of time for the collaborative goal-setting, monitoring progress, and revising the educational plan. Much of this is already a factor in the current, labor-intensive patterns of individual supervision, and, in practice, even the formal monthly review has, in almost all cases, taken appreciably less than half of a supervisory hour. Any possible increases in time or effort would be more than compensated for by the inherent efficiency of resident-specific teaching and learning.

Current supervisory practices can be revised to include principles of ALT and "pull" manufacturing systems that can enhance resident education.