Supervision Assignment Paper: The Discrimination Model

Supervision Assignment
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Supervision Assignment
Field supervision plays an important role of ensuring that students who are at internships have acquired the necessary skills that will enable them to transition what they learn in classrooms into the practical world. The students are expected to learn these skills in work places observing, assisting and receiving feedback from their field supervisors. There is an old adage that holds that a professional who is good at work can be a supervisor. Nowadays this is not the case. Though counselling and supervision share a lot, they employ different skills. Therefore a good professional may not be a good field supervisor for interns without the necessary and appropriate knowledge and skills (Falender & Shafranske, 2004). Although observation is a useful training tool, it will not help students to develop the necessary skills that they need to become great professionals on its own. Student development is enhanced by when the supervisor and the students develop a personal relationship and supervision. Therefore, field supervision has evolved to be a complex concept and many models and theories have been developed to explain it. In this paper I am going to explain some of the field supervision models and how I can be able to use one of them in choosing my field supervisor.
The Discrimination Model
This is the most commonly used supervision in today’s work environments. It was first published in 1979 by Janine Benard. In consists of three supervision steps (intervention, conceptualization and personalization) and three roles that must be played by the supervisor (teacher, counselor, and consultant). The supervisor is supposed to respond from any of these features depending on the situation. The supervisor may assume the role of a teacher while looking at a specific intervention strategy that can help the student or be a counselor at the same time focusing on how the student conceptualizes the work. All these depends on the needs of the student and it can change now and again. First, the supervisor will evaluate the abilities of the student within the assigned tasks, and then chooses the appropriate role to take. The supervisors are cautioned not to respond by taking one role but instead focus on ensuring that the role meets the needs of the student at that moment (Benard, 1979).
Developmental Models
The developmental models outlines the progressive stages that the students must take as they acquire the necessary skills of become experts in their fields. Each stage consists the characteristics that the students must exhibit or meet before they move to the next stage. For example, those students beginning their internship is expected to show limited skills as well as confidence while those who are finishing their field placements will show more skills and be confident. The expert student will exhibit good problem-solving skills and be reflective on what he has acquired during the field training period. There are various developmental models that have been developed by different scholars to help both students and field supervisors.
Integrated Development Model (IDM)
It describes three levels of student development:
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