The Principals’ Corner: 

In the last blog, we talked about teaching as a tri-partite activity – one involving planning before entering the classroom, one in the classroom and one after the class is over.  We called these program planning, instruction and evaluation of student achievement – all part of a whole called teaching.

As I read over the questions I wrote under each category, I realized that they revealed my biases, to some extent, and somewhat indirectly about supervising staff.  My questions placed me firmly within the technical and didactic model of staff supervision – and I can assure you I am still there.  When I started supervising staff as a department head in a high school, I had no background in the area but I did have a major concern about the whole process.  From the time my first principal came into my class in December of my first year of teaching, I was haunted by this question: “What is he looking for?”  It appeared to me that he was breaking a cardinal rule of any game: “If you want to play a game fairly, everyone has to know what the rules of the game are.”

There had been two players in the game – the principal and I as a rookie teacher.  Neither knew nor shared the rules.  For many years I thought about and read about effective teaching and instruction and supervision done fairly and openly.  It was only in later years, as a principal, that I found a very useful text on supervising staff – and I recommend it highly even though it is now a bit dated.  It’s called Approaches to Clinical Supervision: Alternatives for Improving Instruction by Edward Pajak.

If you go to the text, you’ll see a discussion of four major schools of thought for supervising staff:

• clinical supervision
• the humanistic and artistic model
• the technical and didactic model
• the developmental and reflective model.

With scholars like Morris Cogan, Arthur Blumberg, Madeline Hunter and Carl Glickman in each of these fields respectively, it is fair enough to suggest that a supervisor cannot go wrong with elements of any of the processes and there is much to be learned from all of them.  As noted above, I found myself in the technical and didactic school – but at least I knew where I was and felt confident that I could go forward in supervising my staff with some degree of theory to support my practice.  At least one set of rules was clarified!

All of this is to say that, just as a principal must have an idea about what constitutes effective teaching, she/he must have a set of beliefs about what constitutes effective supervision.  Before a principal talks with the staff, he/she must be “comfortable in his/her own skin” – and secure enough in those beliefs to put them to the test by working directly with staff to get them on the same two pages: (1) effective teaching and (2) effective supervision.

Now the work had to begin with staff.  I was committed to the idea that:  a) there would be effective supervision by me and the vice-principals but was also committed to the idea that b) the staff had to be brought along as willing partners in a process that was both frightening and professionally exciting for them. I wanted to make certain that they were part of the design process.

This took three forms:

• The development of an instructional effectiveness committee chaired by a staff member. I was not a member of the committee though, as I told the staff, I would be available to make a presentation to the committee on my ideas as a starting point.
• Setting up an implementation committee whose task it was to determine the best way to introduce the findings of the first committee into practice.
• The use of principal’s advisory committee which included school-based teacher federation members and central district federation officers who could help us determine what roles the principal, vice-principal and the department heads would play in the process – and what was to happen with any of the documentation that was collected during the supervisory process.

The agenda for all three groups was heavy and it took almost two years of hard work by staff to get us to a workable solution in all fronts.

Let’s look at that next week!

Dr. Dan

Check out our Education Services under Individual Coaching and Contracted Services.  There’s a wide range of Teacher Appraisal topics including: Writing Effective Performance Appraisals; Conducting Effective Evaluation Conferences with Teachers; Having Hard Conversations; and more.