What happens in a professional supervision session?
A professional supervision session for an early learning leader is a confidential, hour-long conversation with an AHPRA-registered psychologist or board-accredited therapist, usually monthly. The leader brings whatever is weighing on them (a difficult incident, a staff concern, a family, or the accumulated load of the role) and works through it with someone outside their line management, who does not report back to their employer. The first session usually starts with whatever brought you there. After that, the hour is yours to use. There is no agenda to get through and no form to complete. Most people find the first session a little awkward and settle quickly once they realise nothing they say is being assessed. What leaders tend to take away is not advice so much as a clearer head about a decision they were already circling, and the relief of having said the difficult part out loud to someone qualified to hear it.
When I tell people that work in Early Learning, that I’m a Professional Supervisor, there’s almost always a small pause before the next question. Sometimes it’s curiosity. More often, I think, it’s that the word “supervision” has done its quiet work, and the person across from me is now picturing something fairly grim. A meeting room. A clipboard. Someone checking their practice against a list.
I get it. The word carries baggage in the Early Learning sector, and I don’t blame anyone for flinching at it.
So I thought it might be useful to write about what actually happens in a Professional Supervision session, because in my experience, once people know what they’re walking into, the whole thing stops feeling like an obligation and starts feeling like the thing they didn’t realise they’d been needing.
The first session is usually a bit awkward, and that’s fine
I want to be honest about this part. Most people I see for a first supervision session arrive with their shoulders somewhere up around their ears. They’ve often been talked into it by a thoughtful manager, or they’ve signed up for it themselves but aren’t entirely sure what they’ve agreed to. They sit down, and there’s this small moment where you can almost see them deciding how much of themselves they’re going to bring into the room.
I always say something like this at the start. I’m not here to assess you. I’m not reporting back to anyone. There is no form I’m filling in about your performance. What we talk about stays between us, with the usual exceptions around safety that you’d expect. This hour belongs to you, and we can use it however is most useful. Most people exhale at that point. You can see it happen.
Then we usually spend the first session getting to know each other a bit. I’ll ask about your role, what’s been on your plate lately, what brought you to supervision in the first place. I’ll ask what you’d like to use the space for, and I’ll be honest that you don’t need to have an answer to that yet. Some of the most useful supervision relationships I’ve had began with someone saying “I don’t really know what I need from this, I just know I’m tired.” That’s a perfectly good place to start.
What we actually talk about
Once supervision is up and running, the rhythm of it tends to settle. People bring whatever is sitting most loudly with them that week. Sometimes it’s something specific. A meeting that didn’t go the way they hoped. A staff member they’re worried about. A child whose situation is keeping them up at night. A decision they made that they keep turning over.
Sometimes it’s something blurrier. A general sense of being stretched. A feeling that they’ve stopped enjoying the work. A creeping resentment they’re not sure what to do with. An unease about a particular dynamic in the team that they can’t quite name yet. Both are welcome. The blurry stuff is often the most important to bring, because the blurriness itself is usually a sign that something needs space to come into focus.
What I try to do, mostly, is help people think clearly about what they’re already wrestling with. I ask questions. I notice patterns across our sessions. I gently point out the things they keep coming back to. Sometimes I offer a different angle, or a piece of theory that might be useful, or simply a reflection of what I’m hearing. Quite often I just listen, because being listened to properly is something a lot of leaders haven’t experienced in a very long time.
I don’t tell people what to do. That’s not what supervision is for, and frankly, you don’t need another voice in your head telling you what you should be doing. What you need is space to hear your own thinking out loud, with someone who isn’t tangled up in your work and isn’t going to be hurt or threatened by anything you say.
The kinds of things people use it for
Over time, supervision becomes a place where the bigger stuff can land. Some of what I’ve held with leaders in Early Learning includes the weight of mandatory reporting decisions, and what to do with the residue of those weeks afterwards. The grief of losing a child from the centre, whether through a family moving away, a tragedy, or simply the natural arc of them ageing out. The exhaustion of holding a team through something hard, like a critical incident or a difficult investigation. The loneliness of being the most senior person in a building, with no one to take it to.
And then there’s the everyday stuff, which matters just as much. The educator who isn’t quite working out and the conversations you’ve been putting off. The parent who has been making your life difficult for months. The board or owner who doesn’t seem to grasp what you’re holding. The slow realisation that you’ve stopped going for walks, or seeing your friends, or feeling much of anything when you get home.
All of it is supervision material. Nothing is too small, and very little is too big.
What you tend to take away
I’m always cautious about overpromising what supervision can do, because the honest answer is that it’s slow work, and the changes are usually quiet ones rather than dramatic ones.
What I do tend to see, though, in people who stick with it, is something like this. They make decisions from a steadier place. They stop apologising for things that aren’t theirs to apologise for. They get clearer about what’s their job and what isn’t. They start trusting their own judgement again, which is something a lot of leaders have quietly lost without realising. They become a bit more able to let things land at the end of the day, instead of carrying everything home in a tight bundle in their chest.
And quite often, they tell me that they’ve started looking forward to the session. That this hour, in a week that is full of other people’s needs, has become a kind of small protected space that’s just theirs.
If you’re thinking about it
If you’ve been wondering whether supervision might be useful for you, my honest answer is that you’d probably know by now if you didn’t need it. The Directors and leaders I work with tend to arrive having carried a lot for a long time, and the moment they realise they don’t have to carry it alone is often quite a moving one.
You don’t have to have a problem to bring. You don’t have to know what you want from it. You don’t have to perform anything. You just have to be willing to sit down for an hour with someone who’s there for you, and see what wants to be talked about.
At Lerni, this is the work we love most. If anything in this has stirred something in you, we’d be glad to have a conversation about what supervision could look like in your world.