Being an Internship Supervisor: Finding Relevant Topics for Continuing Education

It is Monday of Professional Development Week, and I am looking forward to two long weekends in a row. My intern and I will be spending our time later this week in various trainings and webinars and independent learning. I spent last Friday doing a training about how to teach readers with different learning challenges, so I am in a training type mood. Next week is the holiday week, so we will work on Monday and Tuesday again and then have the rest of the week off as well. This is one of the reasons that I like November - I spend a good part of the month not at work!! Two four-day weekends in a row are refreshing (I don't count Sundays since I work on Sundays...). I am going to spend some time engaged in continuing education and self-care as well.

There is something nice about pursuing continuing education. I enjoy being able to find my own topics and things that I want to learn more about. One of those topics is always competency-based clinical training, so I will be spending some time reading and coming up with some upcoming presentations for others.

The worst thing about pursuing continuing education is keeping my attention on a computer screen. I do not do this well, but that's a rant for another day.

For the next two days, we (my intern and myself) are going to do our sessions (I only have two groups in the next two days - but, I do have five individual sessions), write out our documentation, and get through our days. After Tuesday, it is time to focus on music therapy-specific learning. I have to find some ethics credits between now and December next year when my Board Certification comes up for renewal again. I thought I was finished with that requirement, but it turns out that the last ethics course I took was in 2016, so that was the last cycle's ethics requirements. Good thing that I do my renewal in year four rather than in year five. I would be scrambling if I was doing this process in year five. (That's why I don't!)

It is time to get out the CBMT Board Certification Domains, the AMTA Professional Competencies and Advanced Competencies, and my music therapy notebook for note taking. I always start with the documents to help guide my forays into continuing education. I look through the documents to identify areas where I want to do some more learning. If I am not able to identify any areas (which has NEVER happened, by the way), then I go outside of the music therapy world into other therapy guidelines and topics. Right now, though, there is plenty to investigate in the world of music therapy.

In addition to ethics, I am interested in supervision and clinical training, in practicing my music composition and theory, in small business development, and in what other music therapists are doing in the world. I will do my best to not fall into the comparison game - it gets easy to slide down into the deep down of "I should be more like _____." That will have to be avoided at all costs. I will spend some time thinking about my now and my future.

There you go. It is now time to get myself to work so I can start my week. See you soon...