Enhancing supervisees' multicultural orientation is one of the six domains for competency-based supervision in the APA Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology (2025). Although several multicultural supervisory models have been proposed, empirical evidence for the effectiveness of different multicultural supervisory models is limited, and the levels to which training programs and practicum supervisors implement multicultural supervision vary greatly (Watkins et al., 2019).


In this presentation, the presenters will share a multicultural supervisory framework for practicum training with specific samples of supervisory interventions and assignments that integrate key components from several existent models and drawn from the 15+ years of supervisory experiences in various training and clinical settings. Essentially, effective multicultural supervision requires the supervisor to integrate topics of cultural identities, personal biases, relational dynamics, and contextual data of the client, supervisee, and supervisor into the supervisory process with the goals of enhancing treatment outcomes for the clients and strengthening the supervisees' multicultural competencies. The supervisor's genuine curiosity in the supervisee's lived experiences and role modeling strong multicultural orientation are among critical factors. This multicultural supervision framework emphasizes a developmental, intersectional, and collaborative nature in which the supervisor's role and intervention should be tailored to maximize trainees' development, depending on the current competency level of the supervisee. If the supervisee is at the beginning level, multicultural supervision may focus on introducing foundational frameworks of multicultural and intersectional approaches in a structured and practical way. When the supervisee has moved into an intermediate level, the supervisor may spend more time initiating conversations related to diversity and intersectionality as well as their impacts on the client, the supervisee, and their therapeutic alliance. When the supervisee is at a more advanced level, the supervisor may encourage the supervisee to consistently and proactively integrate multicultural and intersectional consideration into all their clinical work.