TPC Journal-Vol 11-Issue-1

4 The Professional Counselor | Volume 11, Issue 1 Despite these documented guidelines and expectations, there is a notable lack of input from supervisees’ perspectives of their roles and related expectations. This is concerning because instructors need to structure their learning environments grounded in evidence supporting student engagement (Malott et al., 2014), which is strengthened by identifying students’ prior learning experiences (Borders, 2019). The Current Study Learning to be a supervisee is a process in which counseling students gain experience starting in their practicum courses. It is critical for the supervisor (i.e., instructor) to understand their supervisees’ perceptions of their roles in supervision, which have been informed by accreditation requirements (e.g., CACREP, 2015), professional standards (e.g., Best Practices in Clinical Supervision , Borders, 2014), and scholarly literature (e.g., Munson, 2002). Yet, supervisors lack access to information from student perspectives for increasing supervisee engagement and meaningfulness of roles, particularly from the counseling practicum course context where students often experience supervision for the first time. In the current study, we sought to understand the expected roles and responsibilities of new supervisees from the perspectives of supervisees within a counseling practicum course. We also included perspectives from the instructional team (i.e., a doctoral student co-instructor, and a counseling practicum instructor) to illustrate the degree of alignment between instructors and students and to illustrate any nuances between instructor and co-instructor views. Using this research, supervisors and counselor educators may be able to offer developmentally appropriate solutions to address supervisee concerns and to provide support to counseling practicum instructors based on both expert and novice perspectives. Accordingly, our study was guided by the following research question: What are counseling practicum supervisees’ views of their roles and responsibilities in the practicum classroom environment? Method Q methodology is a unique research method containing the depth of qualitative data reduction and the objective rigor of by-person factor analysis (Brown, 1996), which can be used effectively in the classroom setting to facilitate students’ subject matter understanding (Watts & Stenner, 2012). Specifically, students’ self-perspectives can be revealed in relation to their peers’ and instructors’ views using Q methodology (Good, 2003). Q methodology has also been used successfully to investigate phenomena in the counselor education classroom (Baltrinic & Suddeath, 2020) and program settings (Baltrinic et al., 2013) that favor both student and instructor views. Accordingly, we selected Q methodology for this study to obtain perspectives from a participant sample of counseling practicum supervisees and their instructional team. Concourse and Q Sample Specific steps were taken to develop a rigorous Q sample , which is the set of statements used to assist participants with expressing their views on supervisee roles via the Q-sorting process (Brown, 1980). The first step was selecting a concourse , which is a collection of opinion statements about any topic (Stephenson, 1978). Many routes of communication contribute to the form and content of a concourse (Brown, 1980). The concourse for this study was composed of statements we took from select supervision literature and documents (i.e., Borders et al., 2014; Homrich et al., 2014; Kangos et al., 2018; Munson, 2002; Stark, 2017). We searched within these sources and selected concourse statements specifically containing supervision experts’ views on supervisees’ roles. We needed 100% consensus on each statement for it to be included in the concourse. The concourse selection process resulted in over 240 concourse statements, which was too many for the final Q sample (Paige & Morin, 2016). Second, we proceeded with selecting, evaluating, and reducing the final Q sample items in line with Brown (1980) and Paige and Morin (2016). Initially, we had our first and second authors, Baltrinic and