A snapshot of our work on the TARSS program over the past six months.
The TARSS team recently completed a mid-year report outlining what they’ve accomplished. This infographic offers a snapshot of their work over the past six months.
Christopher Watson, PhD, and Deborah Ottman discuss the origin of the Reflective Interaction Observation Scale and how the new RIOS Guide for Reflective Supervision and Consultation in the Infant and Early Childhood Field was designed with practitioners’ needs in mind.
The RIOS™ Guide for Reflective Supervision and Consultation in the Infant and Early Childhood Field was recently published by Zero to Three. The book is the culmination of more than a decade of work by CEED’s Christopher Watson, PhD, Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, and colleagues. Professional Development Coordinator Deborah Ottman was directly involved in preparing the Guide for publication. In this Q & A, Watson and Ottman shed light on the origin of the RIOS and discuss how the Guide was designed with applicability in mind.
How did the RIOS itself come about?
CW: Twelve years ago, at a meeting of the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health, a group of us did an activity to try to understand the structure of a reflective supervision session. We came up with a process where five groups of people watched video recordings of reflective supervision sessions. We talked about our responses to what we saw and heard in the recordings, asking questions like, “Can we agree on what we’re seeing in this recording? What do we call it?”
That initial meeting gave us a bunch of data, and for the next eight years or so, a smaller group of us met once a month online to try to further distill the data, operationalize it, and fill it out. Here at the University of Minnesota, we did the final structuring to make that data into a scale that could be used in empirical research.
So the RIOS was intended as a tool for researchers to document and measure the “active ingredients” of a reflective supervision session. But it ended up being useful for practitioners, too.
CW: People immediately grabbed onto it as a way to explain reflective supervision when training both supervisors and supervisees. And supervisors began using it both prior to a reflective supervision session to remind themselves of what they wanted to address in the session, as well as following a session to review what occurred and to determine what they wanted to pursue in future sessions. It became a natural outgrowth. We created a RIOS Manual to train researchers to use the scale for their studies. Later, we decided to adapt the manual to create a how-to guide for practitioners who were using the RIOS as an aid in sessions.
In reality, though, the Guide is completely different from the manual. The manual taught researchers how to code recordings of sessions, in other words, how to put numbers on what they hear or observe and make some meaning of that. The Guide is for practitioners–supervisors and supervisees both, but particularly supervisors and their trainers. The Guide was shaped by input from practitioners around the country, so in it, you’ll read about real-life situations and professional relationships, and about using the RIOS framework to understand what’s happening in those situations.
DO: There are a couple of other ways in which the Guide was specifically created for practitioners in the field. First, there was an effort made to embed principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into the Guide. This was the result not only of collecting the real-world examples that Christopher mentioned, but also of our current cultural moment in the wake of George Floyd’s death and other tragic instances of racialized violence. We received guidance from Dr. Barbara Stroud who, as a contributing editor for the Guide, focused on these issues in particular. She helped us be more specific about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in reflective supervision.
Also, the Guide includes a new tool to help practitioners who are using the RIOS as a job aid: a one-page Self Check form. It’s not an assessment; there’s no right or wrong. It’s a way for practitioners to track their growth and document what they tend to focus on in their sessions.
The Guide is the only book that explains how practitioners can use the RIOS in their jobs.
CW: That’s right. There are other excellent books about reflective supervision, of course. But our goal with the RIOS tool and with this book was to place reflective supervision within a framework with which to understand the processes involved.
DO: And to find ways to actively apply those processes, which are described in the RIOS as five Essential Elements and five Collaborative Tasks of reflective supervision.
But the RIOS is not a checklist, correct? People can’t just go down the list and say, “We addressed all the Collaborative Tasks.”
CW: There’s actually a disclaimer in the book about not using it as a checklist. You don’t have to hit each Essential Element and each Collaborative Task within a session. A given session may focus on one Essential Element, and that would be just fine. Although it’s not a checklist, the RIOS does provide a way for practitioners to look longitudinally or in a big picture way at an ongoing reflective conversation. For example, if I were tracking our conversations over a period of six months, and we never discussed Holding the Baby in Mind, that might be a problem and something we want to look at. We might say, “Well, this time we talked all about the parents’ problems, so in the next session, let’s talk about the baby and their experience.” Even though it may have been really important to talk about the adults’ challenges this time, ultimately you want to get to: “What does this mean for the child?”
DO: You may not be able to get to the child’s perspective until you address some of the things that are happening within the family or things that are coming up for the practitioner. The book is not prescriptive. “Guide” is the perfect word for it. It’s a roadmap that offers you a million different paths to the same destination: the child. And you can choose different paths on different days.
Go deeper with the RIOS with CEED’s online courses, RIOS™ 1: Using the RIOS™ Framework for Reflective Supervision and RIOS™ 2: Advanced Reflective Supervision Using the RIOS™ Framework, starting soon!
Alyssa Meuwissen, PhD, explores ways in which adults benefit from using their imaginations, just as children do.
Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie books are favorites in our household. Willems has a knack for addressing both children and the adults who are reading to them. In I’m a Frog, Piggie teaches her friend Gerald about imaginative play. “You can just go out and pretend to be something you are not!?” Gerald asks in disbelief. Piggie replies, “Sure. Everyone pretends.” “Even grown-up people?” asks Gerald. Piggie’s answer: “All the time.”
Maybe Piggie is referring to imposter syndrome or the pressure that many adults feel to “fake it till we make it.” But given that we’re in a cultural moment where cosplay, live-action role playing (or LARPing), and Dungeons & Dragons are enjoying a surge in popularity, I also wonder about taking Piggie’s statement literally: we “grown-up people” really do enjoy playing pretend.
Maybe you’ve never been to a comic con, and you haven’t put on a costume since you gave up trick-or-treating. But I’d argue that the majority of what adults do for entertainment still engages our imagination. Think about the types of entertainment you enjoy. Do you look forward to a regular game night? Do you like to curl up with a good book? Which are your favorite movies and TV shows? Why do you like these forms of recreation? I asked friends and coworkers what they look for in a book, movie, or TV show. They answered:
Media fire our imagination and tap into humans’ connection to stories. A baking show allows us to try on the idea of being a baker, even if we rarely turn on the oven. A character-driven novel helps us empathize with people who are different from ourselves. A superhero movie gives us the chance to escape the mundane and experience feeling powerful. These are all strikingly similar to the reasons why children play.
Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, MSed, writes in the journal of the American Association of Pediatrics:
Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles, sometimes in conjunction with other children or adult caregivers. As they master their world, play helps children develop new competencies that lead to enhanced confidence and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges.
I think that we adults turn to our favorite forms of entertainment for similar benefits.
We know a lot about the importance of play in childhood. Fred Rogers said, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning.” I remember reading about the various functions of play in my undergraduate textbook. At the time, I was skeptical; I couldn’t remember engaging in play as a child that specifically addressed social-emotional needs. But as an adult, I’ve often thought back to those functions of play as I watched the children around me. Having fun is certainly part of play. But play offers other important benefits, including:
The psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, “In play a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.” When my nephew was little, his family’s apartment was near their building’s dumpsters. The noisy weekly process of emptying the dumpsters scared my nephew. His response? Become the garbage collector. My nephew played “garbage truck” exclusively for months, constructing neighborhoods where his toy truck could empty bins over and over, and ultimately, conquering his fears.
An acquaintance described an experience in which she turned to pop culture to allay her fears, just as my nephew turned to imaginative play. Nervous about giving birth to her first child, my acquaintance decided to try and channel one of her favorite cultural icons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to prepare mentally for the experience of labor. A study done here at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development attests to the effectiveness of this strategy. Researchers Rachel E. White, PhD, and Emily O. Prager, PhD, described what they called the “Batman effect”: children persevered at a task longer when they pretended to be a heroic character. My acquaintance, too, took advantage of the “Buffy effect.”
A key aspect of the Batman effect is that pretending to be someone else allows us to psychologically distance ourselves from a situation. Psychological distance means we’re less emotionally involved and more able to use our executive function skills–like working towards a goal or controlling our impulses. Recently, my 2-year-old daughter was playing with her toy puppies. She pretended that the puppies were fighting over which would go into the swimming pool first. My 4-year-old daughter pretended to be the puppies’ mom and said, “Let’s think about a way that we could work this out for both of you.” Would my daughter have taken this calm, logical approach in a real disagreement with her sister? Probably not! Her psychological distance from the puppies’ disagreement opened up the opportunity to practice her conflict resolution skills in a way that was “a head taller” than her typical behavior in her own life.
Similarly, adults may favor content that they can maintain at least some psychological distance from. I’ve heard from a number of parents that since having children, they avoid books and movies whose plots include threats to children. These are too close to home, too emotionally activating. Certainly, narratives are most engrossing when we care about the characters and situations presented, but we don’t want to care too much.
I’m struck by the fact that two of the most enduring fiction genres are romance and mystery. These stories can be repetitive: the couple always gets together, the detective always catches the bad guy. Maybe these classic genres are so appealing because they address some of the biggest life challenges that adults face in the modern world: creating connection and acceptance, and conquering the threat of living in a society with other people. Yet romances and mysteries explore these challenges in ways that preserve our psychological distance by being very different from our actual situations, and their endings resolve the messiness of interpersonal relationships. While children may want to read the exact same picture book ten times in a day, the adult version of mastery through repetition may look like consistently engaging with familiar genres.
All of us–adults and children alike–are looking for mastery and control over our lives. My spouse has a demanding job as a hospital physical therapist. He is also a parent to two young children with lots of their own opinions. In short, his daily life involves a lot of interactions where he doesn’t have control over the other person’s emotions or reactions. Even after a long week, he likes to relax by playing complex strategy games like Everdell, Wingspan, Pandemic, or Scythe. These games offer the opportunity to make decisions that have a direct and immediate effect on the outcome of the game. Win or lose, you control the imaginary world of the game. Table-top games may also offer escape from unpredictable social interactions, or even the opportunity to practice social skills and process experiences. In a recent Wired article about the therapeutic use of table-top role-playing games, one mental health practitioner touted the “life-magic of narrative social play.”
Play is part of the work of growing up. It helps children practice skills and experience a sense of mastery that builds confidence. Is the same true for adults? I wonder how we might benefit from prioritizing play and imagination in our lives, whether it be at work or at home with our families and friends. How can you use your entertainment and leisure time intentionally to provide fulfilling self-care? What do you do to play? How will you use your imagination today?