Deliberate Practice in Psychotherapy Supervision: A Promising Paradigm for Enhancing Clinical Effectiveness Even if We Still Have Puzzles to Solve

The current paper is a commentary of the four papers (Brand et al.; Husby, Sacks, and Rosén) on deliberate practice (DP) as applied to psychotherapy supervision across therapeutic methods and contexts, published in this virtual issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session. The commentary starts by situating the efforts of DP into the broader context of psychotherapy research and therapist effects (TEs), before providing a brief summary of each paper. All the papers point to the fact that traditional supervision often misses opportunities to practice specific clinical skills and the promotion of translation of reflection into action. They each give hands on and engaging cases of supervisory practices. Still, there are some critical questions that warrant attention which concern some of the assumptions that DP supervision is based on, which are discussed here. These are: (1) Are client outcomes enhanced as a result of DP supervision?; (2) Is it true that declarative knowledge does not translate into procedural knowledge?; (3) Does DP supervision put too much emphasis on the supervisor's ability to know what needs to be changed? and (4) Is it possible to apply the principles of DP to a dyadic enterprise such as psychotherapy? While clinical supervision based on DP principles is promising, there are issues to be solved, and we should proceed with sobriety with regard to how much DP may enhance the training of psychotherapists and clinical practice.