Interactional Supervision

3rd Edition

Lawrence Shulman, MSW, EdD, is professor emeritus and former dean, University at Buffalo School of Social Work. He is a practitioner–researcher who has developed the interactional model of practice and supervision building on the foundation work of William Schwartz.

Shulman is widely used as a trainer and consultant on direct practice with individuals, families and groups, supervision and administration, field instruction, child welfare, and teaching. His research has focused on operationalizing and testing skills for helping professionals at all levels of an organization or agency. He has also explored the impact of contextual factors such as agency policy, cost-containment efforts, caseload size, staff stress, job manageability, and traumatic events on the caseload to develop a grounded, holistic model.

Shulman has written or edited 18 books and monographs including books on supervision and management and a widely used social work practice text, The Skills of Helping Individuals, Families and Groups and Communities, now in its sixth edition (Cengage Publishers). His most recent book, Dynamics and Skills of Group Counseling (Cengage Publishers, 2010) presents the interactional and mutual aid model for group practice.

His research results are reported in Interactional Social Work Practice: Toward an Empirical Theory and in a number of published articles. He was the author of the supervision section in the last three editions of the Encyclopedia of Social Work and has been a contributor to The Social Work Dictionary. Shulman is on the editorial boards of six major journals, was the coeditor of The Clinical Supervisor, and has published often in professional journals. He was also the cofounder and cochair of the NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse)-funded International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Clinical Supervision (2004 to 2009).