Rob Holdsambeck – Supervision: Flying Over Kansas Thinking About Oz

1.0 Type II Supervision CE Credit

This talk was filmed at the 2019 Leadership and Supervision Conference at The University of Kansas

About the presentation:

The movie version of Frank Baum’s classic 1900’s children’s novel (The Wizard of Oz, Warner Brothers, 1939) has been analyzed for decades from various angles.  There are archetypes like Glenda the good witch and Toto the trickster, yellow brick roads (i.e., golden path that lead to hopes and dreams), a false wizard, and a long treatise on courage, intelligence, and heart. In the end, the journey showed how weathering storms and pursuing dreams can produce positive outcomes. This is of course unless the flying monkeys and fields of poppies get you first. The journey of supervision can be viewed as a parallel experience to those that Dorothy and her peers experienced in The Wizard of Oz. Providing a structure for leadership and supervision in the fields of clinical psychology and applied behavior analysis can be a challenge.  It takes weathering adversity, surrounding yourself with the right friends, following the right path, and valuing diversity.  In this talk I will cover some strategies for providing supervision in challenging environments both in my current practice of ABA and my past work as a clinical psychologist.