Some have an idealized version of the kind of mentor they would like to have giving them at-the-ready expert career advice. In this article, the author offers some examples of career wisdom and professional guidance that have shaped him over the course of his career. They are from supervisors who would never claim to have mentored him, but whom…

This commentary underscores efforts of this special issue to highlight concepts related to culture and cultural competence designed to broaden thinking about multicultural consultation through research, practice, and training. It does this by illustrating the insights presented regarding (a) cultural issues in training, (b) the effect of…

If the author was to pinpoint her greatest passion as an educator, it would be that of mentoring teachers. Everyone knows the statistics of how many new teachers leave the profession after just a few years and that one of the factors in retaining them lies in the value of a quality mentor. Looking back, the author realizes that educators' first…

For this commentary, the author went back and read most of her own writings on graduate education. Having only just retired but still working with supervisees and doing research, she reflects on supervision and culture. She has four questions for authors and readers: (1) What is supervision?; (2) What are the implications of "sameness" and…

In the light of viewpoints that pedagogy has been an obvious missing category in considerations of scholarly supervisory work, the author argues that the existing theory on the (more established) scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) may be successfully adapted to make it highly applicable to supervisory scholarship. Research supervision…

In this essay, the authors talk about higher degree supervision as a human relationship, and shares how to supervise a PhD. There's a tendency now to talk about supervision as if it's a technical process one needs to learn the rules of. This paper urges educators to think about this as a human educational relationship, which has all the ups and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to share the reflections of a group of five academics who started supervising practice-based doctoral students at a similar time in the same institution. Design/methodology/approach: The supervisors engaged in a collaborative research process themselves, exploring their supervision practices, due in part to…

Evaluation and coaching should not be linked, these authors argue. Although it's tempting for evaluators to identify deficiencies and then specify coaching as a remediation strategy, doing so turns coaching into a consequence of a poor evaluation and termination into a consequence of failed coaching. Another mistake is to use coaching as a data…

Exploring postgraduate supervision practices with supervisors is a complex and contested endeavour. The growing body of literature on approaches to working with supervisors attests to this. Unlike some areas of higher education research, studies of supervision span theoretical spectrums from liberal approaches (e.g. Ballard and Clanchy 1991; Bruce…

Publications about postgraduate studies and the supervision address issues and concerns such as supervisory orientations and strategies, ways to handle postgraduate students, challenging postgraduate education practices, factors related to success in postgraduate studies, the benefits of advanced studies, transition to independent research and…

Evidence suggests that group clinical supervision of counsellors and trainees is an effective mode of service delivery. However, clinical supervision is often understood to be concerned with teaching a generic set of skills. Without specifically labeling them as such, clinical supervision groups are implicitly identified as psycho-educational…

Presents a definition and examines arguments for and against the clinical supervision model for teacher improvement. (SJL)

There is a current consensus in the literature and policy documents on postgraduate supervision that positions mentoring as the most effective supervision strategy. Authors suggest that this approach to supervision overcomes some of the problematic, hierarchical aspects embedded in supervision as a pedagogical practice. They portray supervision as…

Our rapidly changing society will need individuals trained and skilled in leadership. Leadership is a process designed to maximize individual contributions to organizations and society. Research has shown that there is no one way of exerting leadership. Leadership behavior can be grouped into two categories: task behavior and relationship…

Describes special program on live supervision in family therapy given at 1988 annual American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD) Conference that featured experts Barbara Okun and Fred Piercy discussing "cotherapy" and "one-way mirror" live supervision approaches. Provides edited transcript of their program.…