Informs the dynamic space between intern and managing supervisor

Supervision is by nature a managerial process with monitor and control functions and requires a mechanism for informing the supervisor’s decisions (Coetzee & Roythorne- Jacobs, 2007, p. 32). The task requires the gathering of measurable performance information and performance evaluations. Traditional tools include time sheets, performance reports and a variety of quality control measures. By acknowledging the internship context as a tertiary education institution with a hierarchical organisational structure, supervision anchors good governance, best practice, service excellence and other bureaucratic jargon. Thus the managing supervisor requires information from the intern about the number of student contacts and the quality of support students receives. Managers go about their business as instructed by policies, procedures and quality management systems (Richardson, 2002). They monitor, control and report by ticking boxes on key performance areas. They initiate quantitative analysis on student turnover numbers and measure service outcomes with customer satisfaction surveys.

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In this quantitative frenzy, the CCI's organisational citizenship is reduced to an uneducated guess of where to tick a box, because few managers were IOP students and few know what organizational citizenship means.

During the internship the managing supervisor was responsible for the productivity of the intern as part-time employee at the university and in her role as counselling supervisor she was responsible for his professional development. As manager her tasks included the training and evaluating, benchmarking the quality of the training programme, measuring performance, documenting overtime and rectifying anomalies. As counsellor her responsibility spoke towards the wellbeing of the intern and the wellbeing of the clients. She had a responsibility to facilitate the professional development and career development of the intern. It was in this space that the intern was introduced to qualitative research and reporting. Within this quantitative environment the intern wrote reflections, learnt about ethical counselling behaviour, organisational citizenship and quality service. The analysis reveals training and praxis features.

4.2.2.1 Training features

Counselling phrases are an essential tool in interventions and serve several functions. They maintain rapport, structure interventions and minimize the risk of wild cat conversations and provide a professional sound. Reflecting on a staff meeting, ELC 87, "Staff meeting", the intern recorded how the five counselling phrases evolve through mutation in the annual training sessions: “The mimic of the five counselling phrases is very similar” (ELC 87). The training method evolved from printed script into a theatrical performance. The level of acceptance of this change is also revealed: “That is magic in its own right, but it’s magic for me, because it affirms a training idea” (ELC 87).

An example of how reflective practice revealed information to the managing supervisor (Bolton, 2010) about the intern’s competency readiness in psychometrics is ELC 194, “Back to Jung”. The confidential nature of psychometrics requires that the utmost care is taken to monitor and control the tests. The learning process required the intern to first administer the psychometric tests on himself. The need for this was to

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become acquainted with the format and facilitation of the tests, to build confidence and to understand the self in relation to the test outcomes. This reflection informed the supervisor about the difficulties the intern experienced:

Why did I throw Jung back the first time? Easy. Defining intuition as independent of reason is not scientific and just simply dumb. Intuition is not divine intervention and not quantum physics in practice. It is probably information processing in the prehistoric areas of the brain. There is nothing unconscious or spiritual about that. This contaminates the test results completely. I feel I think too much. (ELC194)

Training in a dynamic space to facilitate self-directed learning (Hase & Kenyon, 2007) develops the career counselling professional (Bolton, 2010; Coetzee & Roythorne-Jacobs, 2007).

4.2.2.2 Practice features

To directly manage the quality of the counselling process, an intake form was used to structure sessions. It captured factual information about the student, the student’s concerns and the transactional information. Transactional information may be the number of modules the student decided to register for. The CCI facilitated this career conversation process and ensured that all supporting documentation were completed and filed. This process revealed nothing about the CCI's competencies and learning. This was the nested context for reflective practice. The reflections were an indirect monitor and control tool and covered only career conversations selected by the intern to reflect upon. The drawback of information on only a few conversations was softened by the increased coverage of the context when a conversation was reflected upon. Reflections as management tool gave qualitative information on some career conversation sessions and depicted reality in broad strokes (Bolton, 2010; Hase & Kenyon, 2001).

The managing supervisor could not manage skill transference between training and practice, but she could create a facilitating environment and introduced reflective practice to ensure learning and monitoring feedback loops. ELC 124, “Poverty and

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low pigment-count”, informed the supervisor about competency deficits and revealed how the intern judged the student from his/her opening statement. The reflection also revealed the intern's realisation that it was bad judgement impeding ethical praxis and informed the supervisor about the intern’s corrective behaviour: “How fragile is ethics in a counselling environment? Even counsellors judge out of habit” (ELC 124).

Reflective writing also aided the supervisor to manage the intern within the context of skillful service agent for the organisation. In “Post-50 choice”, ELC 142, and in “Hyper-tension and mysteries”, ELC 145, students made allegations about the intern's alleged incompetence as advisor with regard to course requirements. How the CCI coped with, and interpreted, these allegations flowed through to the managing supervisor who had to decide how to act on these cues. “No laughing matter”, ELC 176, also reflected on a service deficit, but this time it was a telephone request about access requirements. In this reflection the intern provided evidence of crossing the empathy line: “After I finished the call, I said to the peer-helper that this was an example of how it should not be done. There is no excuse that fits the crime” (ELC 176). The reflection highlighted the experience and informed the supervisor about the corrective learning that resulted: “[W]hen I felt my blood pressure rising, I should have gone for the breathing exercises from my 3rd [external] supervision” (ELC 176).

Reflective practice, as quality control instrument, runs the risk of positive bias, because the intern mostly selects the experience that will make him/her look good. Although the risk of a positive bias is real and undesirable, these reflections are useful feedback for the supervisor, because s/he can act on it. Thus reflections manage the risk and are also action research (Bolton, 2010) into the quality of counselling interventions. With reflections as data, the supervisor has leverage to improve the quality of service and build the intern’s competencies, because the ELCs are assessments of cumulative experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), which show the transfer anomalies and learning bifurcations. Thus, with using reflective writing for managing praxis, the picosubsystem is monitored and the quality of service can be researched within the CCI ecosystem.

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