Associate Training Director, Practicum

Description Associate Training Director, Practicum Lorenz Clinic of Family Psychology — Southwest Minneapolis Metro Who This Is For You have been doing supervision long enough that your attention has shifted. You are less interested in your own caseload than in the conditions that produce good psychotherapists. You have opinions about what those conditions require — and you have probably felt the frustration of working inside settings where those conditions keep getting structurally compromised. You know the practicum window is one of the most formative periods in a clinician's development. You have watched programs treat it as a credentialing exercise. You have tried to do something different inside the constraints you were given, and you have felt the friction that comes with having a point of view. You are not looking for a leadership role because you want fewer sessions. You are looking for one because the formation work has become the work — and you want to do it inside an institution that has built something designed to hold it. If that paragraph described you, keep reading. If you're primarily looking for a title change or a lighter caseload, this is probably not the right fit. About Lorenz Clinic Lorenz Clinic is a private outpatient practice and psychotherapy training institute serving children, families, and adults across seven locations in the southwest Minneapolis metro. We use both words deliberately. The clinical work funds and grounds the mission. The institute is what gives the clinical work its shape, its meaning, and its reach. We treat systems, not symptoms. We develop clinicians, not just employees. We hold clinicians so clinicians can hold clients — a principle that runs through every level of the organization, from the therapy room to the supervisory relationship to the architecture of the training program itself. Our approach draws on Winnicott's holding environment, Bowlby's secure base, Bion's work on containment and group dynamics, Bateson's systems epistemology, and Falender's supervision doctrine — not as historical references but as living frameworks actively applied in supervision, consultation, seminar design, and organizational life. The practicum program sits at the base of a vertically integrated formation ladder that runs from master's practicum through Post-Master's Fellowship, doctoral internship, and postdoctoral fellowship. The practicum rung is not preparatory. It is the first serious encounter with clinical formation — and it sets the developmental trajectory for everything above it. A practicum student who is well-held in her first year arrives at the Post-Master's Fellowship ready for what it asks. One who isn't, doesn't. The ATD for Practicum is responsible for that difference. The Position The Associate Training Director for Practicum is a system-wide leadership role. It sits on the clinic's leadership team, reports directly to the CEO with a dotted line to the COO, and operates in a formal dyad with the Director of Clinical Operations. This is not a program management seat. It is a stewardship seat with institution-wide reach. The ATD holds the master's-level practicum program across all clinic sites through a corps of site-based supervisors whom she consults, develops, and holds to the formation framework. She carries a small direct supervision load but functions primarily as the architect of the system above it: providing reflective consultation to the supervisory corps, maintaining fidelity across sites, and ensuring supervision operates as a genuine developmental discipline rather than a compliance exercise. The ATD also serves as a reflective consultant to one site-level unit — participating in the organizational architecture through which reflective practice is held at scale across the institution. The central intellectual task is scaffolding: moving practicum students, over a 9–12 month arc, toward the competencies required for Post-Master's Fellowship entry. This requires holding two developmental pictures simultaneously — where a trainee is, and where she needs to be in twelve to eighteen months — and designing the structures, seminar experiences, and formative relationships that close that gap. It is not remediation. It is architecture. The practicum-to-PMF transition is not a handoff. It is a seam that the ATD for Practicum and the ATD for the Post-Master's Fellowship hold together. The supervision architecture is in place and the supervisor corps is strong. The developmental scaffolding system, the seminar arc, and the practicum-to-PMF transition framework are yours to build. Core Responsibilities Hold and develop the practicum supervisory corps: providing regular reflective consultation to site-based supervisors, maintainin