Being An Internship Supervisor: All The Things We Can't Learn in Four Years of Schooling

Way, way back, in the beginning of my internship supervising days, I was taking a course on Advanced Supervision in Music Therapy, or something like that. As part of the course, I was acting as a practicum supervisor for four students at our local university, and I was also supervising an intern from the same program. This was shortly after the merger in 1998, and the AMTA Professional Competencies had just been released with the expectation that all university programs would switch to competency-based education by the year 2006. The project for the class set me on my competency-based clinical training path.

One of our projects was to take each one of the competences set down in the document and identify where undergraduate and graduate equivalency students learned about, experienced, and mastered each one of the competencies. We engaged in debate and conversation, week after week, and I became more and more concerned with the number of skills, identified by the professor, that "we don't address that during coursework. Students get that information during their internships."

Now, keep in mind that this was a new thing happening for us former NAMT people. The AAMT had used competencies as part of their educational format for many years, but it wasn't as well know in the NAMT side of the music therapy world. We were trying to figure out ways to put the competencies into what "we already do," which we found was almost impossible without placing the role of educating students about important music therapy job requirements onto a disparate group of music therapy internship supervisors. The part that REALLY got to me? The fact that the university NEVER told me about the holes in the curriculum. I was supposed to just figure it all out, I guess.

This was the first step in my competency journey, and this journey has taken me to many places over the past 23 years. I moved into courses about curriculum and instruction during my post-graduate educational programming. I have based my entire evaluation on operationally defining all the AMTA competencies, and I continue to refine this process into what works well for me. 

Competency-Based Clinical Training is something that takes some time to set up, but it pays off during the evaluation period for each intern. I have not had an evaluation argument with interns since I started this way of evaluating - that may be because my interns are good ones (for the most part) but the way things are set up, it is easy to justify an "area of focus" grade when I have not seen a particular behavior or skill demonstrated in the session. I can more easily justify my grades when they have to happen due to the requirement that I observe these skills within the assignments that are part of the program. I am always happy to share - just send me a message!