Abstract
While consensus on the importance of deliberate practice (DP) in
psychotherapy increases, clarification of key elements in DP supervision
is yet to be seen. An international collaboration between researchers,
authors, supervisors, and therapists has proposed a method for DP
supervision and created a training program for DP supervisors. This has
led to a six-step overview model for DP and the DP Supervisor Competency
Rating Scale (Vaz, Rousmaniere and Husby, 2023). DP in the context of
supervision has concrete steps and requires specific supervisor skills.
This article illustrates these with a case study consisting of twelve
sessions with a supervisee that is a seasoned clinical psychologist and
a trained DP supervisor. Annotated session transcripts provide a
step-by-step qualitative representation of the collaborative process in
identifying client challenge, therapist deficit and actionable learning
goals as well as the in-session behavioral rehearsal. The article
presents the DP-supervision overall trajectory, as well as both
supervisee´s and supervisor´s input on the process. It discusses the
importance of integrating conceptual, conditional, and procedural
knowledge in therapist development, and claims that the same is true for
DP-supervisor development. Finally, the need for empirical investigation
of the proposed key elements in DP supervision is emphasized.