Tag: spiritual-care

Supervised Group Reflective Practice Still Matters—Beyond the Drift (Part 2)

Explore why supervised group reflective practice remains essential for chaplaincy formation and how education providers can sustain it in modern training. Review practical strategies and pathways to integrate reflective practice into contemporary programs.

Introduction

In Part 1, we explored the roots of supervised group reflective practice and why it remains essential for the formation of chaplains. We identified a growing tension: as academic programs expand, the embodied, communal learning that shapes competent spiritual care is slipping to the margins.

Reflective practice is costly, complex, and time-intensive. It doesn’t fit neatly into funding models or timetables. Yet without it, chaplaincy risks becoming theoretical—detached from the lived realities of suffering and hope. Formation happens in the crucible of experience and reflection—not in isolation, but in community. The question is: how do we design training that honours this truth, supports chaplains and those they care for, and meets students’ practical needs for sustained, structured, supervised reflective practice alongside ministry and workplace practicums?

Why Reflective Practice Matters

Clinical pastoral training for chaplains, pioneered by Richard Cabot and Anton Boisen, set a standard that remains relevant today. For decades, there has been broad agreement on a minimum standard for chaplaincy practicum in public institutions: a 400-hour unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) or an equivalent training program. The challenge lies in how “equivalency” is understood.

A typical 400-hour CPE unit in Australia weaves together four core components. First, Supervised Group Reflection occupies around 90 hours, usually delivered across 18 days at five hours per day, with about three-quarters of that time devoted to presenting pastoral encounters and engaging in reflective discussion. Second, students receive 10 hours of individual professional pastoral supervision, ensuring personal accountability and growth. Third, the clinical placement spans 160 hours, of which approximately 100 hours involve direct patient or client-facing care. Finally, study and assignments account for 140 hours, including the preparation of nine detailed pastoral encounter reports. These elements run concurrently, creating an integrated learning experience where theory and practice inform each other.

The critical feature of this model is that the work experience component is accompanied by sustained reflection in community—what we call Supervised Group Reflective Practice (SGRP). This is not an optional extra; it is the heart of formation.

Two Pathways Forward

To meet chaplaincy guidelines requiring a 400-hour unit of CPE or equivalent, education providers can consider two approaches. The first is to partner with an accredited CPE Centre and create a training pipeline for students. This preserves the traditional model and its proven strengths.

The second approach is to embed supervised practice within a course by designing a genuine 400-hour experiential component. This involves developing an equivalent tailored SGRP program in collaboration with a professional supervisor trained in a group supervision model—such as Value-Based Reflective Practices© developed in Scotland by chaplains. It is vital that the supervisor has experience providing professional-level chaplaincy or spiritual care. This ensures that the reflective process is grounded in real-world expertise.

Why SGRP Matters

The benefits of SGRP extend far beyond individual reflection. Trainees not only explore their own practice but also engage with 30 to 40 pastoral encounters from colleagues working in diverse settings such as mental health, aged care, defence, hospitals, and palliative care. This shared learning enriches everyone’s practice and fosters a deeper understanding of the spiritual challenges faced across different contexts. These challenges—grief, loss, suffering, trauma—are universal, reflecting what it means to be human in community.

Practical Implementation

SGRP can be delivered in various ways to suit different programs. Groups may meet in person, online, or in hybrid formats. Sessions can be scheduled weekly, fortnightly, in intensive blocks, or as retreats. An equivalent 400-hour unit can even be divided into two or three smaller units to fit semester or trimester structures. Education providers might also collaborate to create cross-institution groups, broadening the diversity of experience.

What Students Gain

Through this process, students learn to work competently with expressions of faith, religiosity, and spirituality. They internalise trauma-informed care, cross-cultural competency, and ethical frameworks, while also developing sector-specific skills such as dementia care, moral injury support, and mental health first aid. Reflective practice is structured through written reports that guide students to recall and explain encounters, apply models, explore spiritual issues, evaluate challenges, and generate insights for future practice. By the end of a 400-hour unit, students have reflected on their own eight to ten encounters and learned from thirty to forty of their peers’ experiences—a rich tapestry of learning that cannot be replicated through private reflection or theory alone.

A Closing Invitation

Cabot’s centenary is not nostalgia—it is an invitation. The spiritual needs of people have not changed. People still suffer and still search for words. Staff still carry burdens, and sustained, supervised group reflective practice is the most reliable way I know to become the kind of chaplain who can meet them.

There is this: practise, reflect, practise again—in community.

Supervised Group Reflective Practice Still Matters—A Century After Cabot (Part 1)

Why does supervised group reflective practice still matter for chaplains a century after Richard Cabot’s call for clinical training? This post explores the roots of Clinical Pastoral Training and why embodied, reflective practice remains essential in today’s chaplaincy formation.

A century ago, Dr Richard Cabot issued a plea that still resonates: chaplains need more than theory—they need a clinical year. Not just books and lectures, but bedside learning—where life is raw and questions are real. Anton Boisen called patients “living human documents.” Those words remain luminous. They remind us that formation is not abstract; it happens in the presence of suffering, in the fragile spaces where meaning frays.

When I speak of Supervised Group Reflective Practice, I mean formation groups where pastoral encounters are brought for honest reflection and feedback—where peers ask the questions we’d rather avoid, and supervisors hold silence until insight comes. It’s the rhythm of noticing, wondering, and seeing. This practice shapes future encounters with new perception and awareness. And it’s not just for healthcare chaplains; it matters wherever professional spiritual care is offered—aged care, defence forces, mental health, prisons, and more.

Cabot and Boisen built their training model on the emerging discipline of social work, using case studies as the foundation. That approach gave rise to Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), now the standard in many countries. The Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) describes CPE as supervised encounters with people in crisis, grounded in feedback from peers and educators. The method is simple and profound: learn by doing, reflect in community, then return with practice reimagined.

Why does this matter? Because spiritual care is more than theory—it’s practice. Practice that works at the edge of suffering, where people search for words and those who care carry weight they cannot name. Reflection in community teaches us to stand there without flinching, to listen beneath the surface, and to remain in the tension without collapsing the space with quick fixes—to notice and wonder before seeing.

Spirituality is a dynamic, relational dimension of life. It shapes how people experience, express, and seek meaning, purpose, and transcendence. It includes how they connect—to themselves, to others, to nature, to the significant and the sacred. Good spiritual care improves quality of life, coping, and resilience. But competence is key. Chaplains need to move seamlessly between two principal modes of care: the reflective presence of compassionate listening and the reframing processes that help people find new meaning. They need to know which mode they’re in, when they shift, and why. Frameworks like the Living Wholeness CURE model (Dr John Warlow) or the Attuned Listener (Dr Jackie Perry, Columbia University) can scaffold these encounters. But these skills don’t come from books alone—they come from repeated practice, held and examined in the crucible of community reflection.

Here’s the challenge: chaplaincy training is increasingly embedded in university programs. That brings strengths—scholarship, research literacy, consistency. These matter. But as curricula grow, links to robust practical training become thinner. We risk forgetting John Dewey’s maxim: “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” A practicum that simply places a trainee in a workplace isn’t enough. True learning requires a disciplined program of supervised thought, reflection, and evaluation.

Practicums without supervised group reflection expose both trainee and care recipient to risk—care that lacks safety, care that may be ineffective, and trainees repeating the same mistakes. We see the need, yet feel the drift toward academia. Reflective practice groups are labour-intensive and costly, and they don’t fit neatly into funding models. In Australia, chaplaincy formation risks becoming over-theoretical. We need balance—embodied experience and communal wisdom alongside theology and pastoral theory. Integration, not substitution.

For years, a 400-hour unit of Clinical Pastoral Education or equivalent has been considered the minimum practicum for chaplaincy in hospitals, prisons, and defence forces. For Christian chaplaincy, this practicum sits alongside theological studies—neither replacing the other. Education providers have struggled to implement these sustained supervised practicums, often omitting structured reflective practice groups. The result? Programs that miss the heart of formation.

We stand at a crossroads: chaplaincy education risks becoming overly theoretical, while the need for embodied, reflective practice remains urgent. How do we reclaim what Cabot and Boisen knew—that formation happens in the crucible of experience and reflection? In Part Two, we’ll explore practical steps and models that can help us bridge this gap.