Who Trains the Next Generation of Counselors? Inside Counselor Education and Supervision

Knowing confidentiality from a text would not enable a counseling student to explain its limits to a frightened client adequately. Developing this capacity and informing a client requires practice, feedback, and sound judgment from the professionals who teach and are responsible for helping future counselors meet their responsibilities.

Counselor education and supervision connect classroom learning to best practices in professional counseling. Your professional development as a licensed counselor can deepen your sense of responsibility to prepare future counselors for practice with due competence to serve clients’ needs.

What Counselor Educators Actually Teach

A counselor educator’s primary focus is teaching students counseling theories to prepare them to use these theories in practice. Student needs shape course content and classroom discussions, and the counselor educator models skills and evaluates students’ mastery of those skills. The counselor educator also helps students become aware of how their own assumptions affect their counseling practice.

Consider a role-play exercise where students practice working with a client whose beliefs differ significantly from the counselor’s. After the exercise, the educator could have students explain what happened in the session, identify potential biases in their responses, and consider alternative ways to respond to the client. Such a lesson helps students develop the ability to make the best choices in complicated situations and explain why they made them.

Another aspect of teaching counselor education is also skill-based. A successful practicing clinician may need to learn about adult learning, competency assessment, and effective feedback-giving and receiving to teach other counselors well. Teaching these skills is also skill-based and thus considered part of the broader skill set of counselor education.

How Supervision Differs From Counseling

In terms of functional responsibilities, practicing clinical counselors focus on assessment, treatment planning, and the client’s progress in treatment. Supervisors have similar concerns but from the perspective of the counselor in training. Their concern is the development of the counselor-in-training’s professional competence.

For example, a supervisor may review a video of a session and examine how the counselor treated the client. In discussing a particularly difficult moment in the session, the supervisor may ask the counselor to explain what led them to a particular response. This helps uncover gaps in the counselor’s knowledge and habits of practice that, if left unchallenged, could become habits the counselor repeats in future sessions with other clients.

The Responsibility to Assess Readiness

Encouragement alone does not mean that someone is ready to practice counseling independently. Educators and supervisors must recognize when more instruction or a structured improvement plan is needed. This is called gatekeeping.

Effective gatekeeping of student preparedness for practice requires documenting specific concerns and clear, understandable standards to assess improvement in each area. Concerns and standards for improvement must be clearly communicated to students along with specifications for how students will be assessed in the areas needing improvement.

Moving From Clinical Practice Into Counselor Education

For counselors interested in teaching, the transition often involves doctoral study alongside opportunities to develop research, supervision, and instructional experience. Clinical knowledge provides valuable context, but academic work requires explaining that knowledge, evaluating evidence, and supporting other people’s learning.

One doctoral route is the GCU doctorate in counseling, including a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision with quantitative and qualitative research options. The quantitative option emphasizes numerical data and statistical analysis, while the qualitative option examines experiences and meaning through systematic interpretation. GCU describes this doctorate as supporting non-clinical opportunities and not leading to professional licensure. 

When setting expectations for someone’s career, it is important to distinguish between completing a doctorate program and licensure to practice as a counselor. Therefore, while a Licensed Counselor who wants to go into teaching and/or supervision may start their preparation in a CEP-accredited doctoral program, completing that program will not automatically enable them to practice as a counselor. Separate credentials and approval are needed.

Research That Shapes Professional Training

Much of the research counselor educators conduct focuses on classroom and training environments. For example, they might investigate the effects of giving different kinds of feedback to trainees to enhance their sense of competence in using counseling skills. Or, they might research how trainees experience supervision in cross-cultural settings.

Ultimately, the question guides the method. That is, if one is examining scores from various assessments of professional skills, quantitative analysis is most suitable. However, when trying to explain why students perceive a particular supervisory approach differently, interviews are more suitable. Again, careful design, adequate treatment of participants, and a conclusion stating the limitations of the evidence are all essential.

Useful research can be applied in many ways. For example, a Counselor Educator might rework an assignment after learning that students can learn content but struggle to apply it. In turn, a training program might rework its means of assessing progress if its current assessment methods fail to measure critical professional skills.

How Educators Contribute to Policy and Standards

This work may also extend to working with professional organizations to support accreditation processes and address issues of access to counseling for populations in need.

The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs, or CACREP, includes leadership and advocacy in the doctoral preparation of counselors in research, teaching, and supervision in its six areas of doctoral preparation for the counseling profession. 

The standards for these six areas outline how counselors will be prepared to become teachers, supervisors, and counselors of other counselors to teach, evaluate, and organize how counseling is practiced.

By nature, these issues need scrutiny, especially since educators are experts in their particular field of study. Thus, although educators may bring much-needed evidence to issues of access to services or other training issues, their viewpoint is but one to consider when addressing such institutional issues.

Choosing a Role That Fits Your Goals

If you are thinking of moving to academia, consider what will be at the center of your work life and how you will sustain interest in developing the next generation of counselors and in research questions that may take years to answer. You will enjoy your clinical work, but not necessarily all of a faculty member’s work.

As individuals explore different roles within academia, they must consider whether the activities that take up most of their time support their career goals. Even if a person enjoys practicing as a counselor, they may not enjoy every aspect of being a faculty member. Therefore, they should consider different universities and programs, such as a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision at Kent State University and a PhD in Education with a concentration in Counseling at Old Dominion University. The individual must look at the different curricula, the research of the faculty, the opportunities for teaching, and the goals and expectations of the program.

The profession’s future depends on well-prepared counselors who are fairly assessed for readiness for counseling practice. The profession is also strengthened by counselors in teaching, supervision, and research roles. Thus, if you are a counselor considering academia as a career choice, you will find the Department of Counselor Education at Kent State a rich arena for professional growth and development, influencing individual career development as well as the profession as a whole.