Folk Concepts in Psychotherapy Supervision: A Learning Sciences Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70839/e7payj85Keywords:
psychotherapy teaching, folk concepts, ISTDP, metacognitive questions, dialogical supervision, experiential learning, clinical thinkingAbstract
When students learn psychotherapy, they bring implicit folk concepts—naïve theories of psychological functioning learned in their families and cultures—that conflict with clinical knowledge. If supervisors do not recognize these folk concepts, they continue to drive students' thinking even after scientific concepts have been taught. This paper integrates research from the learning sciences to help supervisors identify common folk concepts, such as the belief that defenses can be "taken away," that theories can be aggressive, or that passive listening allows unconscious material to naturally surface. We examine how lecturing, the most common supervisory approach, creates passive learning that students replicate with their patients. The solution is an experiential, dialogical supervision that uses systematic questioning to teach clinical thinking. We demonstrate how decision tree questions reveal the steps of assessment, metacognitive questions monitor learning, and experiential learning helps students discover the limitations of their folk concepts. By developing a theory of the student's mind and teaching through questions rather than lectures, supervisors can facilitate the conceptual change process, enabling students to shift from folk psychology to clinical thinking.
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