Supervision as Professional Development and Renewal

Supervision as
Professional Development
and Renewal
Allison Mackley
September 2010

Objectives
 Understand one framework for teacher
learning and supervision
 Explore several practices of professional
development and renewal
 Gain insight into the power of collaborative
culture

Building Capacity
Building the capacity of teachers is important
because it is a key factor in improving student
achievement.
 With your table group, come up with a
definition of “capacity” as it relates to this
quotation.

Some Background
 Purpose of Supervision: To help teachers improve
 What the teacher knows
 The development of teaching skills
 Teacher’s ability to make more informed professional decisions
 Be a better problem solver
 To inquire into his or her own practice
 Traditional means of improvement: in-service in which supervisors
choose programs
 More recent means of improvement: professional development in
which teachers play a key role in deciding the direction and nature of
their professional improvement
 Neither in-service nor professional development is expansive and
penetrating enough to tap the full potential for teachers to grow
personally and professionally (Bollin, Falk and colleagues).

Frameworks for Growth
 When supervision shifts away from providing
improvement experiences and opportunities,
renewal begins to dominate (Bolin).
 Supervision as renewal is more fully
integrated into the everyday life of the school.
 Teachers commit to sharing their practice
and to helping each other create collaborative
communities of practice.

Capacity as Personal and
Professional
 Think about a time that you wanted to learn how to
do something (i.e. play an instrument, learn a
language, perfect a hobby, etc.).
 What drove you to do something about the fact that you
didn’t have the knowledge or skill.
 What would have happened if you didn’t pursue the
knowledge or skill?
 How does this relate to teaching?

In-service Training
 Directive and structured
 Responsibility in hands of someone other than teacher
 Emphasis on the development of job-related skills through the
provision of training and practice experiences
 Assumed that teachers have limited capacity or will to figure
things our for themselves
 Serves less to provide growth and more to meet legal
requirements
 Program activities selected and developed for uniform
dissemination without giving serious consideration to the
purposes of such activities or the needs of individual teachers

In-Service
 Assumptions
 Knowledge stands above
the teacher.
 Knowledge is instrumental.
It tells the teacher what to
do.
 Teaching is a job and
teachers are technicians.
 Mastery of skills is
important.
 Roles
 Teacher is consumer of
knowledge
 Principal is an expert
 Practices
 Emphasize technical
competence
 Build individual teacher’s
skills
 Through training and
practice
 By planning and delivering
training

 Develops professional expertise by involving teachers in problem
solving and action research
 Teachers and supervisors share responsibility for planning,
development and provision of staff development activities
 Focus is much less on training than on puzzling, inquiring, and
solving problems.
 Provides teachers with the opportunity to reflect on their practice
and share with others.
 Characterized by “intensity of personal involvement, immediate
consequences for classroom practice, stimulation and ego
support by meaningful associates in this situation, and initiating
by teacher rather than outside” (Thelen).

 Assumptions
 The teacher stands above
knowledge.
 Knowledge is conceptual. It
informs the teacher’s
decisions.
 Teaching is a profession
and teachers are experts.
 Development of expertise is
important.
 Roles
 Teacher is constructor of
knowledge.
 Principal is a colleague.
 Practices
 Emphasize clinical
competence.
 Build professional
community
 Through problem solving
and inquiry
 By emphasizing inquiry,
problem solving and
research

Renewal
 The development of the personal and professional self through
reflection and reevaluation
 Renewal implies doing over again, revising, making new yet
restoring, reestablishing, and revaluing (Bolin).
 Teacher engages in the process for himself or herself
 Assumes a need for teachers to grow and develop on the job
 Less of a function of polishing existing skills or of keeping up with
the latest developments and more a function of solving problems
and of changing as individuals.

Renewal
 Assumptions
 Knowledge is in the
teacher.
 Knowledge is personal. It
connects teachers to
themselves and others.
 Teaching is a calling and
teachers are servants.
 Development of personal
and professional self is
important.
 Roles
 Teacher is internalizer of
knowledge
 Principal is a friend
 Practices
 Emphasize personal and
critical competencies
 Build caring community
 Through reflection and
reevaluation
 By encouraging reflection,
conversation, and
discourse

Designing Professional
Development Opportunities
 Offer meaningful intellectual, social, and emotional engagement
with ideas, with materials, and with colleagues
 Take account of the context of teaching and the experience of
other teachers
 Offer support for informed dissent as a means to evaluate
alternatives and to scrutinize underlying assumptions for what is
being proposed or done.
 Place classroom practice in the larger context of purposes and
practices of schooling.
 Provide teachers with ways they an see and act upon the
connections among students’ experience, classroom practice,
and school wide structures and cultures.
 Prepare teachers to employ the techniques and perspectives of
inquiry in an effort to increase their capacity to generate
knowledge and to assess the knowledge claimed by others.
(Judith Warren Little)

Empowering Teachers
 Enable teachers to exercise more control over their
classrooms.
 More control is needed for teachers to make the
changes in their practices that are necessary for them to
teach more effectively.
 Participation in a professional community of like-minded
colleagues has a significant effect on their ability to know
better what to do in the classroom and to adapt their
teaching strategies to more effectively meet student
needs.
(Milbrey McLaughlin)

Professional Community
 Ideal setting for teacher learning and for providing the
professional development opportunities which enhance this
learning
 Learning and teaching depend heavily upon creating, sustaining,
and expanding a community of research practice.
 Members of the community are critically dependent on each
other
 Collaborative learning is not just nice but necessary for survival
 Interdependence promotes an atmosphere of joint responsibility,
mutual respect, and a sense of personal and group identity.

Building a Professional
Community
 At your table group brainstorm several
benefits of a professional community.
 What must change in the current system to
encourage the development of a professional
community?

Benefits of a Professional
Community
 Encourage teachers to reflect on their own practice
 Acknowledge that teachers develop at different rates and at any given
time are more ready to learn some things than others
 Acknowledge that teachers have different talents and interests
 Give high priority to conversation and dialogue among teachers
 Provide for collaborative learning among teachers
 Emphasize caring relationships and felt interdependencies
 Call for teachers to respond morally to their work
 View teachers as supervisors of learning communities in their own
classrooms.

Research on Teacher Learning
and Teacher Effectiveness
 According to Dennis Sparks and Stephanie Hirch
(National Staff Development Council), effective
teacher learning is
 Focused on helping teachers become deeply immersed in
subject matter and teaching methods
 Curriculum-centered and standards based
 Sustained, rigorous, and cumulative
 Directly linked to what teachers do in their classrooms
We cannot expect teachers to use yesterday’s training to
prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s future.

Effective Practices
 Programs conducted in school settings and linked to schoolwide efforts
 Teachers participating as helpers to each other and as planners, with
administrators, of in-service activities
 Emphasis on self-instruction with differentiated training opportunities
 Teachers in active roles, choosing goals and activities for themselves
 Emphasis on demonstration, supervised trials and feedback; training
that is concrete and ongoing over time
 Ongoing assistance and support available on request
(Sparks and Susan Loucks-Horsley)

Results: Eisenhower Professional
Development Program
 Structural Features
 Form
 Duration
 Participation
 Core Features
 Content Focus
 Active Learning
 Coherence
Specifically our research indicates that professional development should
focus on deepening teacher content knowledge and knowledge of how
students learn particular content, on providing opportunities for active
learning and on encouraging coherence in teachers’ professional
development experiences. Schools and districts should pursue these goals
by using activities that have greater duration and that include collective
participation. Although reform forms of professional development [i.e. study
groups, mentoring, peer inquiry, teacher networks] are more effective than
traditional forms [i.e. workshops], the advantages are explained primarily by
greater duration of the activities.

Successful Professional
Development
 Must be grounded in inquiry, reflection, and experimentation that are
participant driven
 Must be collaborative, involving a sharing of knowledge among
educators and a focus on teachers’ communities of practice rather than
on individual teachers
 Must be a sustained, ongoing, intensive, and supported by modeling,
coaching, and the collective solving of specific problems of practice
 Must be connected to and derived from teachers’ work with their
students
 Must engage teachers in concrete tasks of teaching, assessment,
observation and reflection that illuminate the processes of learning and
development
 Must be connected to other aspects of school change

A Design for Planning
 Five components that constitute a design framework for
planning: intents, substance, performance expectations,
approach, and responsibility
 Consider the following questions to bring a sense of coherence
to the planning process:
 What are we trying to accomplish?
 What will teachers be able to know and do as a result of
engaging in professional development?
 What aspects of good teaching will be the focus on our learning
efforts?
 How can we assess our progress as learners?
 In what ways can our professional development activities and
procedures be improved?
 How shall we proceed from here?
 Who will be responsible for what?

Intents
 It is essential to be concerned with four levels
of intent.
 Knowledge level – I know it.
 Comprehension level – I understand it.
 Application level – I can do it.
 Value level – I will do it.

Substance
 Four critical factors in good teaching which can be improved
through appropriate teacher growth and development (Louis
Rubin):
 Teacher’s sense of purpose
 Teacher’s perception of students
 Teacher’s knowledge of subject matter
 Teacher’s mastery of technique
 A comprehensive staff development program is concerned with
all four of the critical factors.

Performance Expectations
 Know How – I know how to teach and help students learn. (Talk to me.)
 I can teach effectively and am able to get students to learn. (Observe
me.)
 I will teach effectively and I will meet other responsibilities all the time,
even when no one is looking. (Look at lesson plans, assignments,
student work; Use walk-throughs.)
 I will grow on the job. (Observe me, ask me to share ideas with
colleagues, look for changes in my teaching practice.)
Self-employed professionals (doctors, accountants and others) are
forced by competition and by visible product evaluation to give major
attention to the will-grow dimension. Teachers have not felt external
pressure for continuing professional growth. High-stakes testing and
other performance expectations are bring more attention to this area.

Approach and Responsibility
 Traditional Approaches and Supervisory
Responsibility
 In-servicing teachers
 Best when a problem can be defined as a deficit in
knowledge of some kind
 Accompanied by clear objectives and conventional well-
executed instruction.
 Teachers assume passive role and are exposed to logically
structured programs and activities.
 Represent a minimum commitment to teacher growth and
development

continued
 Informal Approaches and Teacher
Responsibility
 Exploration and discovery by teachers
 Provides teachers with a rich environment for
professional learning
 Teachers are personally involved, work
collaboratively with others and have immediate
consequences for classroom practice

continued
 Shared Approaches and
Shared Responsibility
 Low-key, classroom-
focused, teacher-
oriented and
particularistic.
 Teachers’ capacities,
needs and interests are
paramount, but sufficient
planning and structure is
introduced to bridge the
gap between these
interests and school
program and instruction
needs.
 Teachers are actively involved in contributing data,
information or feeling; solving a problem; or conducting
an analysis.
 Supervisors share in the contributing, solving, and
conducting activities above as colleagues of the
teachers.
 In colleagueship supervisors and teachers work together
as professional associates bound by the common
purpose of improvement of teaching and learning
 Staff development activities generally require study of an
actual situation or a real problem and use live data, either
from self-analysis or from observations of others.
 Feedback is provided, by supervisors, by other teachers,
or as a result of joint analysis, which permits teachers to
compare observations with intents and beliefs, and
personal reactions of others.
 The emphasis is on direct improvement of teaching and
learning in the classroom.

Learning Communities
 With your table group, list structures in your
school that support learning communities.
 What must change in your school to support
learning communities?

To take away…
Ability is seen as an expandable repertoire of
skills and habits, professionals are defined as
individual who are continually learning rather
than as people who already know. Their
roles include both teacher and learner,
master and apprentice, and these roles are
continually shifting according to context.

Supervision as Professional Development and Renewal

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