More About Professional Supervision

Recommendation 16.45 of the 2017 Royal Commission states:

"Each religious institution should ensure that all people in religious or pastoral ministry, including religious leaders, have professional supervision with a trained professional or pastoral supervisor who has a degree of independence from the institution within which the person is in ministry."

The Australasian Association of Supervision (AAOS) defines supervision as:

“a contractual, relational, and collaborative process, which facilitates the ethical and professional practice of the supervisee”.

Michael Carroll - Supervision and transformational learning

“The deepest form of learning used in supervision is transformational learning which combines both personal and professional learning. In transformational learning, supervisees reflect critically not just on their experience, but the way they construct their experience. In doing so they open themselves up to new transformational learning which creates new mental maps or meaning -making frameworks that help interpret their experience, learn from it and go back to their work with new insights and new behaviours. This is supervision at its best.”

Peter Hawkins & Aisling McMahon - Supervision in the Helping Professions

“Supervision is a joint endeavour in which a practitioner, with the help of a supervisor, attends to their clients, themselves as part of their client – practitioner relationships and the wider systemic and ecological contexts, and by so doing improves the quality of their work, transforms their client relationships, continuously develops themselves, their practice and the wider profession.”

Graham Joseph Hill — Australian theologian and Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University

"Professional supervision provides a confidential, hospitable, safe place to be brave and honest about life and ministry."

Michael Paterson - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

“Supervision is a facilitated, intentional and sustained conversation between a person’s Soul, Role and Context in which attention is paid to the worker, the work and those impacted by the work.”

Rev'd Dr Geoff Broughton — Australian Anglican priest and supervision academic

"Professional/pastoral supervision is the brave, safe space where clergy and other ministry workers reflect on their ministry practice in a regular, planned supervision session."