Being An Internship Supervisor - On Hiatus

I must admit that I am getting ready for some changes in my internship program these days, and I am starting with the AMTA Professional Competencies which feel like they have changed since the last time I really looked at them, but I guess not (when I look at my current evaluation). Perhaps my thoughts about how different things look are spurred on by my desperate wish that the membership would have actually followed through on the "revision every five years" provision that was put into place about 10 years ago and would have revised this document twice in the past 10 years. This is not supposed to be a rant, so I will simply say that I feel that this document needs to be revised more than once every decade.

Anyway...

I am currently working on a competency-based clinical training project that is requiring me to delve deeply into the competencies, and I am enjoying the opportunity. There are so many things that I like about competency-based clinical training that I can go on and on about how to do this type of interaction, and it is nice to be involved in a project that helps me think through ideas and concepts.

I think there is no better place to be competency-based than in an internship program.

Over the past years and years of being an internship director, I have come up with a competency-based clinical training program that really helps me figure out how to structure my program. I started with the competencies and then started to think about how I demonstrated those competencies in my music therapy program with my clients. This led to operational definitions of each competence - more specific skills that are observable and also easily identified. After I identified operational definitions, I was able to design assignments that addressed specific definitions throughout the internship program. My interns know the skills that I expect them to demonstrate to me at the end of the internship from the first day that they are in the program, and I am going to bring back the pre-internship assessment as well. This will help interns know what I expect since many of them are not bothering to read through their evaluations until they have to fill it out at mid-term. That's a whole other thing to talk about.

So, I am taking a deep look at the competencies - starting from scratch and thinking about what has changed in my job in the past five years. I may change up my expectations, and I am definitely changing bits and pieces of my assignment expectations to reflect these changes.

If you are interested in having a copy of my competency-based evaluation, do not hesitate to ask. I am happy to share and to talk about the benefits of this type of clinical training format. If I ever finish the project I am currently working on, I will share that as well.