DOCUMENT RESUME ED 384 137 EA 026 840 AUTHOR Waite, Duncan TITLE Rethinking Instructional Supervision: Notes on Its Language and Culture. New Prospects Series: 1. REPORT NO ISBN-0-7507-0380-6 PUB DATE 95 NOTE 242p. AVAILABLE FROM Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis, Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 (paper: ISBN-0-7507-0380-6; cased; ISBN-0-7507-0379-2). PUB TYPE Books (010) Reports Rcsearch/Technical (143) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC10 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Anthropology; Communication Research; *Discourse Analysis; Educational Environment; Educational Sociology; Elementary Secondary Education; Ethnography; Interaction; *Interprofessional Relationship; *Power Structure; Symbolic Language; *Teacher Administrator Relationship; *Teacher Supervision ABSTRACT This book presents different ways of viewing the teacher supervision process, based on a study of supervisors and teachers in a graduate program for beginning teachers sponsored by a college of education in the northwestern United States. Data were obtained through interviews, observation, and conversation analysis. Chapter 1 examines beliefs about supervision through an anthropological lens, presenting both various practitioners' and theorists' views of supervision. The second chapter presents research findings on supervision conferences as interactional achievements, with a focus on the supervisor's role and issues of power and control. Chapter 3 examines the same conferences from the teachers' perspectives, using the theoretical frames of teacher socialization and school reform. Teacher resistance is examined in the fourth chapter, allowing for a critique of literature on teacher resistance and a critique of supervision itself. Chapter 5 presents a new approach to supervision--"situationally contexted supervision"--which is based on an anthropological and interactionist view of classrooms and schools. A postmodern theory of "dialogic supervision" is developed in the sixth chapter, an approach that addresses the asymmetries of power relations inherent in conventional supervision. The last chapter discusses the partnership of supervisors and teachers in a professional community. The content of the teacher-supervisor conferences is attached. (Contains 259 references.) (LMI) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** I° S I V U S DEPARTMENT Of EDUCATION Of WI of Educattonet Research and Improvemnl EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 9/finisdocument NM been reprodwd reCeoved irOm 1h1IIOn or orpitruzsbort onvkating tt O Mato. changes have 041 mad* 10 tenOtOvill teitgOduCttoo Quality Pants ot v41,10rOOM,OnfstIstd tn Iles dOeth ment do not necessartiy MOttIlltnt (MOM OERI position or policy "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEP) GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 2 RESTCOPY AV IL Rethinking Instructional Supervision New Prospects Serie,- General Editors:Professor Ivor Goodson, Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario, Canada and Professor Andy Hargreaves, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada. 1 Rethinking Instructional Supervision: Notes of its Language and Culture Dterraiii Waite New Prospects Series: 1 Rethinking Instructional Supervision: Notes on Its Language and Culture Duncan Waite The Falmer Press (A member of the Taylor & Francis Group) London Washington, DC UK The Falmer Press. 4 John Street. London WC1N 2ET USA The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc.. 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 © D. Waite 1995 All rights reserved. No pad of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted in any form or by any means. electdmic, mechanical. photocopying, recording or otherwise. without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published in 1995 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on request ISBN 0 "50" 0379 2 cased ISBN 0 -50' ()i80 6 paper Jacket design 1w Caroline Archer Typeset in 1(1 12 pt Gammon(' by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd.. Hong Kong. Printed in Great Milani 1?iugess .ccience Press. Basingstoke on paper which has a specified pl I value On final paper manufitcture if not less than 7.5 and is there/ore 'acidfree' 6 Contents boretivrd vii Ackilowledgmelits ix introduction:The Limits of Supervision and Beyond 1 Chapter 1The Instructional Supervisor as a Cultural Guide and Other Not So Obvious Roles 11 Chapter 2Supervisors' Talk 27 Chapter 3Teachers in Conference 52 Chapter 4Problematizing Supervision and Teacher Resistance 77 Chapter 5Instructional Supervision from a Situational Perspective 94 Chapter 6Dialogic Supervision, or, Re-embedding Supervision within the Contexts of Change 111 Chapter 7 Creating Environments for Moral, Egalitarian Dialogue: Supervisors and Teachers as Partners in a Professional Community 137 AppendixTeacherSupervisor Onyi,rences 142 Mferences 215 index 226 7 1. Dedication This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my grandfather, Lloyd M. 'Red' Bennett (c.1900-1984),and to that of my uncle. Alan L. Bennett (c.1926- :;92),who both, and in their own ways, provided for me models, visions, and support for my life's journey. 4r Foreword The field of supervision in education has a long history in the United States gating; back more than one hundred years. Early attempts to closely monitor .irriculum and instruction, even though geographic distances in rural areas made close control virtually impossible, and the influence of Frederick Taylor's industrial logic on educational administration during the early twentieth cen- tury, are often cited as evidence that supervision in education is inherently hierarchical and opposed to egalitarian values. For some reason, the strong and clearly voiced dedication to principles of democracy, decentralization, and cooperative problem solving among pioneer- ing supervision authors, such as Edward C. Elliott and James Fleming liosic among others, is rarely acknowledged today. Also overlooked arepublications of the National Education Association's Department of Supervisors and Direc- tors of Instruction during the 1930s, which drew heavily on John Dewey's thinking. These works led to the view of supervision as a collaborative, problem- fOcused, democratic process, an idea popularized in a textbook by A. S. Barr, William 11. Burton, and Leo J. Brueckner, which dominated educational super- vision in the United States until the emergence of clinical supervision in the 1960s. Clinical supervision represented a departure from the problem - focused, group strategies that had until then defined supervisory practice andtheory. While retaining a focus on reflective thinking and problem solving, clinical supervision focused the superisor's attention and efforts directly on individual classrooms as the targets and teachers as the agents of change. Clinical supervision was invented and nurtured at Harvard i!niversit in the 1950s and 1960s by Morris Cogan, who considered it a way to develop professionally responsible teachers who were capable of analyzing their own performance, who were open to change and assistance from others, and who were, above all, self-directing. Many other authors, includingRobert Gold- hammer, Keith Acheson and Meredith Gall. Madeline Hunter, Carl Glickman, Noreen Garman, Kenneth Zeichner and Daniel Liston, and John Smyth, to name just a few, have since contributed their own interpretations tothe con- cept and practice of clinical supervision. This new book by Duncan Waite clearly falls within both the democratic and the clinical traditions in the literature of educational supervision. However, it departs significantly from most existing interpretations of those traditions by 9 Forneord challenging the reader with substantive data, new terminology and concepts, and fresh theoretical perspectives drawn from a broad variety of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Duncan Waite develops an original approach, termed .situationally contexted supervision', which appears to stretch democratic principles to their limits by adding issues of power, hegemony, and resistance to traditional supervisory concerns of involvement, cooperation, and problem solving. He uses detailed analysis of face-to-face interactions between teachers and super- visors to rethink supervision and supervisor-teacher relations, and then pro- poses a dialogic form of supervision that draws on ideas from postmodernism. communitarianism, and feminism. Professor Waite attempts to link the multiple and various contexts of supervision within an organic whole that he believes is more suited and more sensitive to the rapidly changing contexts of modern social, economic, and political global realities. The result is a proposal for a new form of supervision where everything is open to question, where no assumption, behavior, ideol- ogy, or belief is above critique, and where every decision is always open to reconsideration. He urges supervisors and teachers to work together in a humane, caring, and egalitarian manner to create an institution that is flexible, supportive, and constantly renewing itself. Supervisors would become advo- cates of teachers in an ongoing quest for alternatives, instead of imposing their own beliefs or acting on behalf of the formally stated goals of the school.