By Laura Angus, media relations assistant
Two students from OU presented their research at the 4th annual International Interdisciplinary Conference on Clinical Supervision, which was held from June 12-14 in Buffalo, New York. The case study was about the roles of supervisors in counseling, and was written by Sandra Manoogian, a doctoral student in the counseling department, and Sheri Pickover, a graduate from OU’s doctoral program in counselor education, and assistant professor of counseling at the University of Detroit Mercy.
During the conference, experts in supervision from various fields like psychology, social work and counseling presented research. There were educators and practitioners from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and other countries.
“It was really beneficial to me specifically because it was interdisciplinary,” Pickover said.
Manoogian said they could find out how supervision issues were being handled in other fields beyond counseling.
Manoogian and Pickover’s research was a case study about the relationship between the client and the student counselor, the student counselor and their supervisor and the supervisor and their supervisor. They illustrated that problems in one level will transfer to the other relationships.
“We are learning how to train someone to supervise counselors,” Pickover said. “(During the case study) I was training a trainer, and we went into it and made a whole lot of mistakes.”
Manoogian said the case study would be helpful to counselor educators, who need to be looking at how they are training supervisors for problems like these and to know how to deal with them.
“There’s not a lot of education and training for supervisors, but there’s a need,” Manoogian said.
She said their presentation during the conference was well-received. Next, they are putting together a paper from the presentation to submit to journals for publication.
For more information on OU’s counseling program, visit the Counseling Department Web site.