Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies

Developmental domain	Competency area	Supervision question	Case example	Note line
Counselor self-awareness	Attitudes and beliefs	What assumption about your own status showed up before the client finished the first story?	The associate heard a pause and wrote “guarded.” They share a language with the client. Their class histories do not.	Supervisee named the guarded label as an assumption and will ask about pace before coding affect.
Counselor self-awareness	Knowledge	Which history or theory are you using to explain your own status in this case?	The supervisee can name the client’s immigration stress and cannot name how their own citizenship shapes the questions.	Asked the supervisee to bring one source on their own status next hour, not a summary of the client.
Counselor self-awareness	Skills	Where did you check how your status changed the question you asked?	The supervisee asked “Why don’t you just tell your boss?” to a client on a work visa.	Supervisee rewrote that as an options question and will try it next session if the client wants that focus.
Counselor self-awareness	Action	What did you do this week, outside the session, to learn your own status?	The supervisee sat through a required training and could not name one intake change.	Agreed on one intake change before the next new client, not another training hour.
Client worldview	Attitudes and beliefs	What are you still curious about, and what did you already decide?	The client said faith matters. The supervisee wrote “religious” and moved on to sleep.	Supervisee will ask how faith shows up in the week before treating it as background.
Client worldview	Knowledge	Which current issue or stereotype might be sitting inside the presenting problem?	A Black father was referred for “anger” after he questioned a school search. The referral, not the client, used that word.	Supervisee will separate the school’s action from the client’s goal before writing an anger formulation.
Client worldview	Skills	How did you ask about worldview without turning intake into a quiz?	The supervisee ran a 12-item cultural inventory. The client answered three items and went quiet.	Dropped the inventory for this client. Next session starts with the client’s correction, not the form.
Client worldview	Action	What did you change after the client corrected you?	The client said they are not looking for a culture lesson. They need the panic to stop at work.	Supervisee will follow the panic goal and keep the cultural question available, not leading.
Counseling relationship	Attitudes and beliefs	How might your status and the client’s status be pulling this alliance?	The supervisee is older, licensed, and the same gender as the client. The client keeps asking if the supervisee will tell a parent.	Named the authority gap. Supervisee will explain confidentiality limits in plain language next session.
Counseling relationship	Knowledge	When do you stay with individual counseling, and when do you move toward advocacy?	The clinic promised an interpreter and did not send one. The supervisee keeps assigning the client to self-advocate.	Advocacy task sits with the supervisee: request the interpreter. It is not the client’s homework.
Counseling relationship	Skills	What did you say when power or bias entered the room?	The client said “You people always ask about my mother.” The supervisee defended the genogram.	Supervisee will acknowledge the pattern the client named before explaining why a family map might help.
Counseling relationship	Action	Did you invite the conversation, or did you wait for the client to raise it?	Three sessions in, the supervisee has not asked about a language difference the client flagged at intake.	Supervisee will open next session with the language difference the client already named.
Counseling and advocacy interventions	Intrapersonal	What part of the problem is the context, and what part is the goal the client brought?	The client describes shame about needing a college accommodation. The supervisee jumps to exposure.	Map the shame to the accommodation barrier before any exposure task.
Counseling and advocacy interventions	Interpersonal	Who is support, and who is not, in the client’s family or peer group?	The client’s sister drives them to session and also calls therapy selfish.	Ask whether the ride is support, pressure, or both before anyone recruits the sister.
Counseling and advocacy interventions	Institutional	Which institution is blocking access, and what did you do besides name it?	A group home will not release the client for Thursday. The supervisee documented a no-show.	Reclassified the miss as an institutional barrier. Asked whether the client wants the home contacted. That answer is not in the record yet.
Counseling and advocacy interventions	Community	Which community norm is helping, and which one is getting in the way?	The client will not discuss substance use because their church treats disclosure as betrayal.	Ask what the client can say here that they cannot say there. Do not argue with the norm.
Counseling and advocacy interventions	Public policy	Which local, state, or federal rule is shaping this client’s options, and have you checked it?	The client wants couples work. A partner lives in another state, and the supervisee has not checked license location or the payer.	Stopped the couples plan until license location and payer rules are checked. No cross-state session this week.
Counseling and advocacy interventions	International and global affairs	Is a current international event inside this client’s distress, and did you ask?	Sleep collapsed after news from a home country. The supervisee wrote generalized anxiety and stopped there.	Ask what the news is doing to sleep before you add an anxiety protocol.

You can check those domain and competency-area names against the multicultural and social justice counseling competencies in the 2015 PDF (Ratts, Singh, Nassar-McMillan, Butler, and McCullough). The AMCD Executive Council endorsed that document on June 29, 2015. The ACA Governing Council endorsed it on July 20, 2015. It revises the multicultural counseling competencies Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis developed in 1992. The supervision questions, case examples, and note lines are a practice aid you edit. They are not extra items in the endorsed text. Before you call the group home on behalf of an identifiable client, ACA Code of Ethics A.7.b states: “Counselors obtain client consent prior to engaging in advocacy efforts on behalf of an identifiable client to improve the provision of services and to work toward removal of systemic barriers or obstacles that inhibit client access, growth, and development.” License, privacy, and advocacy duties vary by board, setting, and state. Confirm A.7.b and your board chapter before you treat that row as a legal duty.

Educational resource for you as a licensed clinician or clinical supervisor. License, privacy, and advocacy duties vary by board, setting, and state. Confirm the source PDF and your board chapter when the stakes are high. Ask your own counsel before you treat a row as a legal duty.

How you use the checklist in supervision

It’s Thursday, 4:10. Jordan’s intake is still open on the screen, and your supervision hour started four minutes ago. You do not need all 18 rows. You need the one row the hour actually stressed.

Pick the developmental domain first. If the miss was yours to examine in the supervisee, start with counselor self-awareness. If the miss was a guess about the client, start with client worldview. If the miss was the two of you in the room, start with the counseling relationship. If the miss was a barrier outside the room, start with counseling and advocacy interventions.

Then pick one competency area. Ask the question in that cell. Write the note line in the supervision record before Jordan leaves. If your practice already uses a clinical supervision notes template, put the line there. The binder around that note, including where the file lives, is clinical supervision documentation.

You are not scoring a person. You are leaving a trail another supervisor can follow: which area you worked, what you asked, and what happens next.

The four developmental domains

The same PDF names four developmental domains: “(1) counselor self-awareness, (2) client worldview, (3) counseling relationship, and (4) counseling and advocacy interventions.” The document lists them in that order. Start with what you brought into the room before you interpret the client. Look at the relationship before you decide that advocacy is the intervention.

Quadrants in the same framework “highlight the intersection of identities and the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression that influence the counseling relationship.” The PDF says that. It does not hand you a four-box quiz to score in the hallway. When you and the supervisee are both privileged on one status and marginalized on another, name the status that showed up in the hour. Do not average them into a single label.

Maya’s mistake, the week before the Thursday note, was starting at advocacy. Jordan wanted a letter to the school. The client had not said he wanted a letter. The client’s goal was to sleep, and to decide whether to go back to the meeting. Advocacy can be the right row. It is not the first row by habit.

Attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, skills, and action

Inside the first three domains of the multicultural and social justice counseling competencies, you get four aspirational areas: attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, skills, and action. The document calls that set AKSA. You do not march through all four every Thursday.

Use attitudes and beliefs when the supervisee already decided something and has not noticed. Use knowledge when they can describe the client and cannot describe the history, stereotype, or theory they are standing on. Use skills when the question they asked made the client smaller. Use action when the insight stayed in the supervision room and nothing changed in the next intake.

A training certificate is not action. Action, in the self-awareness domain, is something the supervisee does to learn their own status. If Jordan cannot name one intake change after the workshop, the note should say that. Another workshop is not the follow-up.

Counseling and advocacy interventions

The fourth domain is not a fifth pass through AKSA. The competencies say privileged and marginalized counselors “intervene with, and on behalf, of clients at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community, public policy, and international/global levels.” Those six levels are the competency areas in the checklist.

Intrapersonal work stays close to the person. The document defines that level as “the individual characteristics of a person such as knowledge, attitudes, behavior, self-concept, skills, and developmental history.” You still do not treat context as a character flaw. If shame about an accommodation is the story, map the barrier before you assign exposure.

Interpersonal work asks who actually supports the client. A ride to session can be care and pressure in the same afternoon. Ask before you recruit the sister.

Institutional work is the school, the clinic, the group home, the church office that controls the calendar. Naming the barrier in the note is not the same as doing something about it. If the next step is contact on behalf of an identifiable client, use ACA Code of Ethics A.7.b and write any consent where your practice already keeps it. Confirm A.7.b and your board chapter before you treat the call as settled.

Community work is the spoken and unspoken norm. You can ask what the client can say in your office that they cannot say in their community. You do not win an argument with the norm and call that counseling.

Public policy, in the document, “reflects the local, state, and federal laws and policies that regulate or influence client human growth and development.” Your job in supervision is to notice when a rule is shaping the client’s options, and to stop a plan you have not checked. The checklist does not tell you what your license allows. You look that up. You do not invent a national rule in the note.

International and global affairs, in the document, are the concerns that “reflect the events, affairs, and policies that influence psychological health and well-being.” If sleep collapsed after news from a home country, ask what the news is doing before you close the note as generalized anxiety.

The document also says counselors at the intrapersonal level “Employ empowerment-based theories to address internalized privilege experienced by privileged clients and internalized oppression experienced by marginalized clients.” That sentence is one intervention in the source, not a line you paste into every note. If you use it, say what the client asked for and what you actually did.

A question you can ask at intake

You can use the same map at intake, before supervision, so the Thursday note has something specific to chew on. One question is enough. A 12-item inventory is how Jordan lost the client in the case example.

If the client corrects you, that correction outranks the form. The action row in client worldview is the place you record what you changed.

When the next question is a different tool

Some hours are not a competency row. If you and the supervisee are arguing about a stance, humility on one side and a competence checklist on the other, use the comparison of cultural humility and cultural competence. If the argument is which identity model fits the client’s story, use racial identity development models. Those questions are real. They are not a substitute for the note line you still owe from this hour.

ACA multicultural competencies, as a search, usually means one of two documents. The one the ACA Governing Council endorsed on July 20, 2015 is the multicultural and social justice counseling competencies. The 1992 multicultural counseling competencies are the framework it revises. If a handout in your drawer has no endorsement date, do not supervise from it until you have matched it to the PDF.

The MSJCC model is the same document, under the abbreviation the authors use in the overview. You do not need a second checklist for the abbreviation.

Download the supervision notes template

Put the note line on a form your next supervisor can open. The clinical supervision notes template is the meeting record: anonymized case anchor, the question you asked, the guidance, and the follow-up. Download it, then file it with the rest of the supervision binder rather than in the client chart.

If you want that meeting record structured for your review instead of typed from a blank page, the note features show where a draft sits until you sign it. Emosapien can draft it from the supervision context you already captured. You still own the competence judgment. The software does not endorse a domain, and it does not decide when advocacy is yours to do.

References

• American Counseling Association (2014). ACA code of ethics. American Counseling Association, Section A.7.b.
• Ratts, M. J., Singh, A. A., Nassar-McMillan, S., Butler, S. K., & McCullough, J. R. (2015). Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies. Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development.
• Sue, D. W., Arredondo, P., & McDavis, R. J. (1992). Multicultural counseling competencies and standards: A call to the profession. Journal of Counseling & Development, 70(4), 477-486.