Engaging Field Placement Supervisors in Training; Challenges, Opportunities, and ABA Requirements

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Session Type: Discussion Programs

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Externship programs from around the country use diverse methods to engage their placement supervisors to ensure the best educational experiences for their students. The ABA requirements place a hefty burden on program faculty to provide oversight, training, ongoing communication, and evaluation of their supervisors. The pandemic has fostered many innovative approaches to engaging our placement supervisors in order to meet required standards and best practices. These included creating more digital content for supervisors, holding virtual training, broadening the geographic scope of their program’s reach. These opportunities may have provided solutions to pandemic-specific issues, but they were not a silver bullet. There are enduring supervisor engagement challenges, some pre-dating the pandemic, some exacerbated by the pandemic, some we are now facing as we and our supervisors move forward into the “new normal.” These include, but are not limited to, maintaining existing relationships with, and enrolling new placements into, our programs; and enlisting supervisors in formal training. In addition, both we and our student externs may experience challenges in effectively communicating with field placement supervisors.
We need help from our amazing community, and we are certain others do as well.

This session will be a moderated discussion using polls, engaging chat discussions to narrow down topics, and providing space for creative brainstorming around these topics in breakout rooms followed by a whole group debriefing. Participants will share ideas about what has worked to engage placement supervisors, exploring the challenges we have faced and the opportunities we have already, and may yet discover.