Assessing Supervisee Skills and Selecting Supervision Goals
Key Takeaways
- Supervision goals should come from assessment, not supervisor convenience or trainee preference alone.
- Useful assessment sources include direct observation, permanent products, role-play, interviews, self-assessment, client outcomes, and integrity data.
- Goals should be observable, measurable, socially significant, and matched to risk, setting, and current competence.
- A fieldwork trap is approving broad activities without checking whether the trainee can perform the component skills.
Assess Before Selecting Goals
Treat supervisee skill assessment like any other behavior-analytic assessment. Define the relevant performances, gather baseline data, and select goals based on risk, importance, and context. Self-report can help, but it should not be the only source when client welfare or fieldwork verification is involved.
| Source | Example use |
|---|---|
| Direct observation | Treatment integrity, feedback delivery, caregiver coaching |
| Permanent product | Session notes, graphs, FBA summaries, protocols |
| Role-play | Rare, risky, or not-yet-available skills |
| Interview or self-rating | Goals, barriers, confidence, history, preferences |
| Client and staff data | Whether supervisee behavior affects outcomes |
A weak goal says the trainee will understand assessment. A stronger goal says the trainee will write operational definitions that pass a peer review checklist at 90% accuracy across three cases. The second version tells everyone what to observe, how to score it, and when to move on.
Goal Selection Priorities
- Address safety, ethics, and high-risk implementation first.
- Build prerequisite skills before complex independent decision making.
- Include unrestricted activities early enough to avoid last-minute hour problems.
- Choose goals the supervisor is competent to teach and evaluate.
- Reassess when performance data or setting demands change.
A trainee says they want to learn functional analysis. The supervisor has never observed the trainee conducting preference assessments, descriptive assessment, or graph interpretation. What should the supervisor do first?
Which supervision goal is written in the most measurable form?
A supervisor relies only on a trainee's self-rating checklist to verify competence with behavior intervention plans. What is the main problem?