Activity 4: Red & Green Cycles exercise
1) In your small group identify someone to act as a ‘red supervisor’, someone to act as a ‘green supervisee’ and the other members to be non-participant observers.
2) The supervisee should then quickly identify a case issue that they wish to bring to the supervisor; the supervisee might be presenting from any point in the green cycle: uncertain, anxious about taking a risk, with a new idea etc.
3) Role play only the first 5 minutes of the discussion between supervisor and supervisee. The red supervisor should adopt one of the positions along the red cycle, without going over the top, i.e. something not completely untypical.
Note: the task is not to complete the discussion but simply to see what happens in the first few minutes of this supervision session.
4) Observers to stop the role-play after 5 minutes wherever it’s at.
Debrief as follows:
- What range of feelings did the supervisor/supervisee each have?
- What happened to the quality of information exchanged?
- What happened to the original issue/focus on the child/Young Person brought by the green supervisee?
- What would have happened if the session had continued for another 10 minutes?
- How would this session affect the supervisee if they were going straight from supervision to see a service user?
- What would have been the effect of this supervision session on their next supervision session?
5) Now repeat the exercise but this time selecting a ‘green’ supervisor and ‘red’ supervisee. Swap the roles around the small group. Again don’t over play the ‘red’ role.
6) Debrief as above.
7) Now compare what happened in the two exercises: (1) Was the process or outcome different? Note: the differences may not have been dramatic so look for small clues such as level of empathy, eye contact, focus on the issue, addressing feelings. (2) If so, why?
