Rad N Bad: 2,000 Hours, Zero Clinical Judgment? Competency-Based Supervision and Intentional Mentorship

Fieldwork hours don't guarantee clinical judgment. Mentorship does. Mike and I talk about what supervision should actually look like: planned and customized to the person, built on BST, and measured by what supervisees can do, not what they've seen. We also get honest about how new BCBAs get pushed into supervising before they're ready. Disclosures & Publication Info No commercial products discussed. Both instructors supervise BCBA trainees and RBTs. Published: 2025-07-28 Listening to the podcast episode does not earn CEUs; credit is earned only by completing this OpenCEU event.

Accrued fieldwork hours are a weak proxy for clinical competence. In this episode, hosts Sean Yocum and Michael Carrero describe supervision as intentional mentorship rather than task-list compliance. They discuss planning and customizing supervision for each supervisee; prioritizing growth over comfort; creating space for critical thinking, problem solving, and processing; and using generalization of skills, across environments and people, as the metric of supervision success. A supervisee should be able to write a goal, create a protocol, train a team, defend clinical decisions, and revise based on outcomes. The hosts critique remote supervision that consists of brief calls and slide decks, and they discuss the risk of newly certified BCBAs supervising before they have practice experience, with only the required 8-hour supervision training. They make the case for competency assessments that require supervisees to demonstrate skills, including BST, feedback, interpersonal skills, and conflict resolution, before supervision ends. Participants will leave with a competency-based supervision planning tool.

1.5 CEUs (0.5 learning, 1 supervision) · 80 min

1. 1Describe at least three features that distinguish intentional, competency-based mentorship from hour-accrual supervision. Identify observable performance criteria for supervisee competencies such as writing goals, creating protocols, training staff, and defending clinical decisions. Describe how behavioral skills training and performance feedback can be used to build and assess supervisee competencies. Identify readiness indicators a newly certified BCBA should evaluate before agreeing to supervise trainees.

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