Being An Internship Director: Special Topics

One of the AMTA requirements for interns is a minimum of 60 minutes per week of individual supervision - personal discussion about the intern's development and current standing in the program. One of the things that I have found is that 60 minutes a week is not always enough time to talk over all the things that I want to share with interns - and you know me, I do better with some plans and some systems, so I developed some special topic meetings in addition to the 60 minutes per intern per week.

When I have two interns, they go through each special topic twice. When I have one intern, we cover more topics and the topics are not always decided upon by me. I try to put in some of that flexibility when I have two interns, but it is not always as possible as when there is only one.

Anyway, I like our special topic meetings. Today, we will be exploring how to come up with ideas for things to do with our clients during sessions. We have almost finished the school required trainings and all the other topics that we have are music therapy-specific.

I enjoy these special topic discussions. We cover things like opening and closing songs and how to make visual aids and how to talk about music therapy in ways that encourage others to pay for our services. My intern webinar series came out of these topic meetings because my interns were telling me that they didn't know any of this type of stuff - I've found that other interns don't know these things either. So, I started offering free special topic meetings to any interns who were interested. After a couple of rounds where no one arrived, I have stopped doing these webinars, but I don't think that interns are learning these things in school - at least, my interns aren't.

I wish there was a clinical skills class added to our curriculum for music therapy. I wish that class was taught by someone like me - someone who is a dedicated music therapy clinician and who can talk about situations that arise when you are working as a music therapist (and not as a music therapy educator, researcher, business owner, or supervisor - those are VASTLY different roles than that of full-time clinician). I know that will not happen, so I try to offer that information to people who are interested.

If you are interested in starting your own series of topic meetings, keep an eye out on my TPT store. I will be releasing a low-cost outline pretty soon on just this topic. If you want a curriculum for topics, let me know.