PBS Supervision Session Documents: Agendas and Minutes
Introduction
If you want to get the most out of PBS supervision, there's usually a little bit of work to do before and after your sessions.
A good Supervisor can help you reflect, challenge your thinking, identify gaps, and work through difficult situations — but they can't always know what's been happening in your practice, what you've been worrying about, or what you want to develop unless you bring those things into the conversation too.
Good supervision is a shared responsibility. As a supervisee, I think it's important to take an active role in deciding what you want to bring to your sessions and keeping track of what comes out of them. Otherwise, it's very easy for supervision to become a series of useful conversations without much continuity between one session and the next.
Two simple documents can make a surprisingly big difference:
A supervision agenda helps you decide what you want to discuss before the session.
A supervision record or minutes captures what you discussed, what you learned, and what needs to happen next.
Together, they can help create a cycle where one supervision session naturally feeds into the next.
We've talked in another article about developing Supervision Agreements and Learning Goals, which can give your supervision some longer-term direction. Your agenda and session record help translate those broader goals — alongside whatever is happening in your practice right now — into the conversations you're actually having with your Supervisor.
So let's look at what I'd include in each one, and how you can use them without turning supervision documentation into another enormous administrative task.
Before Sessions: Preparing an Agenda
So, what is an agenda for PBS supervision?
At its simplest, it's a list of the things you'd like to discuss with your Supervisor. It doesn't need to be complicated. You could email a few dot points before your session, keep a running document between sessions, or use a more structured template. What matters most is that you've spent a little time thinking about what you want to get from the session before you arrive.
If you prefer a structured agenda, some useful information to include is:
Practitioner/Supervisee name
Supervisor name
Supervision date
Session time and duration
Standing agenda items
New discussion items
Follow-up actions from your previous session
That last one is particularly useful. If you agreed to do something in your previous supervision session, your next agenda gives you a natural opportunity to come back to it rather than letting the action disappear into a document you never look at again.
How Much Should You Put on Your Agenda?
For a typical one-hour session, I usually find that around 3–5 discussion items is realistic. But this depends enormously on what you're bringing.
You might get through several straightforward questions quite quickly, while one complex participant discussion, ethical dilemma, restrictive practice consideration, or significant practice concern could quite reasonably take up most of the session. So don't just think about how many things are on your agenda. Think about their priority.
Put the things you most need support with towards the top. If there's something time-sensitive, high-risk, outside your current confidence or capability, or simply keeping you awake at night, don't save it until item number seven!
It's also completely okay for the agenda to change during the session. Something you initially thought would take five minutes may uncover a much more important discussion. The agenda should help guide your supervision — it shouldn't prevent you from following a useful conversation.
Standing Agenda Items
Some topics may be worth checking in on regularly rather than waiting until something goes wrong. Depending on your role and development needs, standing items might include:
current caseload and workload
new or particularly complex participants
restrictive practice considerations, monitoring, and reduction
upcoming Behaviour Support Plans or other significant deadlines
professional development and learning goals
PBS Capability Framework development
actions carried forward from previous supervision sessions.
You don't necessarily need to discuss every standing item in depth every time. Sometimes a quick check is enough; other times that check will identify something worth spending more time on.
New Discussion Items
The rest of your agenda can reflect what's actually happening in your practice. You might bring:
a participant situation you're uncertain about
a decision you'd like to reflect on or test your reasoning around
restrictive practice considerations
an ethical dilemma
a complex case or something you need to debrief
questions about PBS processes or documentation
a resource, policy, or piece of guidance you're trying to understand
an area of professional development
a capability you're actively trying to build
something that didn't go as planned and you'd like to learn from.
And you don't need to arrive at supervision having already worked out the answer. Sometimes a perfectly reasonable agenda item is simply: “I'm not sure what to do next here, and I'd like to think it through with you.” That's what supervision is there for.
When Should You Send Your Agenda?
I usually recommend spending 5–10 minutes preparing your agenda and, where possible, sending it to your Supervisor around 1–3 days before the session. That gives your Supervisor an opportunity to prepare too.
If one of my supervisees sends me a topic that I haven't looked at for a while, I'll often refresh my knowledge beforehand or locate a resource that might be useful. If they've flagged a particularly complex issue, I can also start thinking about the questions I might want to explore with them. That preparation means we can spend more of the paid supervision session actually discussing the issue rather than using your time while I find information.
Your Supervisor may have different preferences about when or how agendas are sent, so it's worth agreeing on this together.
The important thing isn't having a beautifully formatted agenda. It's arriving with some intention about how you'd like to use the time.
During and After Sessions: Preparing Your Supervision Record
Once you've had your supervision session, it's useful to keep a record of what you actually discussed and what needs to happen next. You can take notes during the session, write them immediately afterwards, or use a combination of the two. Personally, I'm much more interested in whether you have a useful and accurate record than whether you've produced beautifully written minutes, so choose a method you're realistically going to maintain.
There's no point promising yourself that you'll write a detailed supervision record later that afternoon if you know you'll finish the meeting, open your inbox, and completely forget about it!
What Should You Record?
Your supervision record doesn't need to be a transcript of everything you said. Instead, I'd aim to capture things like:
the main topics discussed
important points from your reflection or discussion
decisions or recommendations that were made
resources, guidance or information identified during the session
areas requiring further consideration or follow-up
actions for the Supervisee
actions for the Supervisor
who is responsible for each action
any agreed timeframes.
For example, you might have discussed whether a restrictive practice is being used with a participant, the evidence available, questions that still need to be answered, and what needs to happen next. Your record doesn't need to recreate the entire conversation. It should capture enough information that when you look at it again several weeks later, you can understand what you discussed, what you decided, and what you were supposed to do next.
Make the Actions Clear
I particularly recommend having a separate section for actions. For each action, identify: What needs to happen? Who is responsible? When should it happen?
And remember that actions aren't only for the supervisee! For example:
Supervisee action: Collate the available behaviour data and bring it to the next supervision session.
Supervisor action: Send the supervisee the behaviour analysis resource discussed during the session.
Supervisors should have some accountability for the things they promise too.
At your next session, you can quickly review those actions and decide whether anything needs to come back onto the agenda. That's how your supervision documents start working together: Agenda → Discussion → Actions → Record → Follow-up → Next Agenda
Instead of each supervision session existing in isolation, you're creating some continuity between them.
What About Recording Sessions or Using AI to Take Notes?
Some practitioners prefer to record supervision sessions or use AI-enabled meeting tools to produce transcripts, summaries or meeting notes. These tools can be convenient, but I'd be much more cautious about using them in PBS supervision than I would be about using AI to summarise an ordinary meeting.
Supervision discussions can include personal and sensitive information about participants, families, staff, and other people. Before recording a session or introducing an AI transcription or notetaking tool, you need to think about privacy, consent, your organisation's policies, what information the tool will receive, where that information is processed or stored, who can access it, and whether using the tool is appropriate in the first place.
If you do use an AI-generated transcript or summary, I'd also recommend reviewing it yourself rather than treating it as an automatically accurate supervision record. AI can misunderstand conversations, miss important context, or produce an inaccurate summary of what was actually agreed.
Sometimes the simplest option — making a few useful notes yourself — is also the most appropriate one.
Should Your Supervisor Sign Your Record?
Some supervisees like to send me their completed supervision record afterwards so I can check that it accurately reflects our discussion and add anything important they've missed. Others prefer to maintain their own records.
I don't think every supervision record needs to be an elaborate sign-off exercise. What's more important is that you're maintaining useful documentation of your supervision and that you and your Supervisor have agreed on how records will be managed.
If you would like your Supervisor to review or sign your records, I'd recommend clarifying this as part of your supervision arrangement, including whether additional review time attracts a fee. In my own supervision practice, I don't charge supervisees simply for reviewing and signing their usual supervision record, but other supervisors may structure their services differently.
Conclusion
So, is it really worth spending the extra few minutes preparing an agenda and keeping a record of your supervision sessions?
Short answer, yes.
Not because your supervision documents need to be perfect, but because they can help you get much more from the time you're already spending in supervision. A simple agenda and record can help you:
remember important topics you wanted to discuss rather than going blank when your session starts
prioritise the issues where you most need support
keep track of decisions, recommendations, and actions
follow up on things you and your Supervisor agreed to do
notice themes that keep coming up in your practice
connect one supervision session to the next
keep your professional development and Capability Framework goals moving forward
maintain evidence of your engagement in supervision and reflective practice.
That last point can also be useful when you're demonstrating your development against the PBS Capability Framework. The NDIS Commission's Self-Assessment Resource Guide identifies supervision documentation, supervision practice evidence, and reflective practice evidence as possible forms of evidence within a practitioner's Portfolio of Evidence.
But I wouldn't recommend keeping supervision records just because you might need to demonstrate something later. For me, their biggest value is what they can do for your practice now.
Imagine that you bring a participant situation to supervision because you're unsure what's contributing to a behaviour. You discuss your current thinking, identify gaps in the information available and agree that you'll collect some additional data before your next session. You record that action.
Before your next session, you review your previous record, add the participant back onto your agenda and bring the new information with you. You and your Supervisor look at what you've learned, reconsider your original thinking, and decide what needs to happen next.
That's supervision becoming an ongoing reflective process rather than a series of disconnected conversations.
Your documentation also doesn't need to become another enormous administrative burden. Once you've found a format that works for you, an agenda might take five or ten minutes to prepare and your record might simply capture the key discussion points and actions. You can even use one combined Agenda and Supervision Record document, keep it tailored with your usual standing items, and store your records somewhere you can easily find and refer back to them.
If you couldn't already tell, I'm a major advocate for supervision agendas and records! Give them a try if you're not already using them. Keep them simple, make them useful, and actually look at them again.
Your future self will thank you for it.
Still Looking for a Supervisor?
If you're looking for PBS supervision and want to see whether we might be a good fit, you're welcome to book a free 20-minute compatibility chat with Rebecca. We can talk about where you're currently at, what you're hoping to get from supervision, and what kind of supervision arrangement might work well for you.
Want to Read More about Supervision?
If you'd like to keep exploring supervision, you might find these useful:
1-on-1 versus Group Supervision: What Do You Need?: Explore some of the differences between individual and group supervision and where each approach may be useful.
Maintaining the Supervision Relationship: Consider how to keep supervision useful over time, including communication, feedback and what to do when something isn't working.
Supervision Agreements and Learning Goals: Learn how to establish expectations for the supervision relationship and identify longer-term goals for your development.
What to Consider When Organising Supervision: Think through how often you might need supervision, how long your sessions should be, online versus face-to-face supervision, and the kinds of support a PBS Supervisor may provide.
Picking a Behaviour Support Supervisor: Consider what you're looking for in a Supervisor and how to decide whether someone is a good fit for your practice and development.
