Supervision in social work: learning from success

Supervision forms an essential component of professional social work practice. It supports the development of the capacity and skills of both students as emerging practitioners and of more experienced social workers. Reflection is a key part of supervision because social work practice is constantly evolving due to rapid change in society. Supervision provides social work practitioners and students with an opportunity to speak openly and honestly about their work, and the everyday feelings and emotions they face whilst in practice. This enables both improvement in practice and prevents the buildup of stress. In this article we explore different methods of supervision utilised in social work and highlight implementation in Slovenia and England. We developed our own framework of supervision drawing on our knowledge of research from Slovenia and England; moreover, we engaged in informal discussion with colleagues in England, and more formal process with supervisors in Slovenia, to inform the development of this model. This article thus reports the conceptual findings of a study and introduces our own model of reflective supervision, which is founded on the premise that we learn better from good experiences than from mistakes. We believe that through the proposed format of appreciative practice we can move from deficit-based practice to strengths-focused practice.