Fieldwork supervision: more education is warranted.

Abstract

Students completing fieldwork are the future of our profession. We can no longer allow our fieldwork educators to develop skills to supervise, teach, and evaluate students on a trial-and-error basis. By allocating resources to develop continuing education materials to be used in developing these skills, the profession will be acknowledging its long-standing espoused commitment to fieldwork. The development of continuing education materials must be based on an understanding of how experienced clinicians reason about their practice and transform occupational therapy theory into clinical practice. Critical analysis of the reasoning process will help us teach this process to students. Additionally, we need to develop self-contained educational materials to prepare our fieldwork educators to design fieldwork programs, supervise students, and handle administrative issues related to fieldwork. Finally, fieldwork educators and academic faculty need to collaborate to provide our future practitioners with an integrated academic and clinical education.