After reading this chapter, you should be able to

• Explain how the focus of supervision evolved from improving the institution and its employees to improving students' learning.
• Describe the challenges and turning points in the profession of educational supervision.

Rob Becker, an experienced principal, shared positive insights with us about supervising and evaluating teachers in a building where 70 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. Rob confirmed that the district evaluation policy clearly addresses needs of veteran and probationary teachers and was developed with the intent of helping principals like him complete formative and summative evaluations to improve teaching. However, when we asked Rob about the ways in which his district's guidelines for supervision and evaluation specifically target improving student learning, he paused before giving this thoughtful and revealing reply:

It seems that they should, but I think that particular message of supervision and evaluation has been implicit, whereas the goal to improve teaching and professionalism has been explicit. It would be really easy to wrap my practices deliberately around improving student learning. Why hasn't that been identified more succinctly in the research and literature? Honestly, it just makes sense.

Does Improving Teaching Always Improve Learning?

The more principals we interviewed, the more interested we became in answering this question: Why is it that the goals of supervision are to improve both teaching and student performance, yet traditional supervision strategies focus primarily on the teacher's teaching, generally minimizing or even ignoring growth in student learning? Moreover, why are some supervisory visits to classrooms viewed as supportive while others are dreaded and seen as occasional events of perfunctory judgment? Why do principals feel as though they must act as both collaborative instructional leaders and critical evaluative administrators—roles that many find difficult if not impossible to reconcile?

Although a vast literature base indicates that educational supervision in the 21st century aims to improve learning for all students, the procedures principals follow continue to require them to concurrently evaluate teacher performance and coach teachers to reflect on and improve their instruction and assessment methods. We believe that we are at the promising point in history where we as educators can define a supervisory movement to improve student learning. The key is to implement the research findings on ways that teaching can positively affect learning.

What we should not do is continue to chase deadlines for "making teachers accountable" through communicating test scores and probable sanctions. If the education profession continues to focus on inspecting summative student data—and primarily using these data to determine which schools should be closed and which principals are "weak" and should be replaced—we will miss out on the myriad, research-supported ways that classroom data can inform better instructional and supervisory decisions. History convinces us that to take the road less traveled this time around offers the real reward we seek, which is improved student learning.

In this chapter, we take the time to describe the important evolution of our profession because it shows that while supervision had been adjusted on a continual basis to improve professionalism, there have been relatively few changes in practices designed to ensure gains in student achievement. As we continue to meet with supervisors, we find that retracing the historical milestones in the development of the profession (see Figure 1.1) not only helps supervisors appreciate the foundations of their role but also clarifies the opportunity that now lies before us: to engineer contemporary educational goals rather than simply react to events.

Figure 1.1. The Evolution of Educational Supervision

Pre-1900: Supervision as Inspection Local citizens inspect facilities and instruction Supervision based on intuition rather than technical knowledge Early 1900: Scientific Organizational Improvement Superintendents manage routines and inspect teachers Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1916) Time and motion tasks Rating scales 1900–Midcentury: Teacher Improvement and the Democratic Motive Move to abolish a narrow curriculum (Dewey) Teaching "tasks" not like business "tasks" (Elliott) 1930s–1950s: Change and Collaboration Supervisors as specialists Expanding job market drives teaching adjustments 1960s–1970s: Clinical Supervision Fostering leadership Focus on improving rather than evaluating teaching 1980s: Teaching Behavior and Student Response Effective teaching is teachable Professional growth plans 1990s: Focus on the Learner America 2000 and Goals 2000 Learning standards for students 2000s: Supervision for Improved Learning Accountability Standards-based improvement for learning and teaching

The Earliest Model: Supervision as Inspection (Pre-1900)

The people who built colonial schools in North America and sent their children there varied in their customs by region, thus providing an interesting economic and geographic contrast between the New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern schools. The schools themselves ranged from the rural, one-room schoolhouses to town schools governed by selectmen to aptly named moving schools (led by traveling teachers). There were also dame schools run by women in their homes, private schools, and schools for trade apprenticeships. Teachers were generally orthodox schoolmasters preparing for work in the legal profession or young women seeking income. The most common curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, and often the religious catechism directed toward outwitting Satan, as exemplified by the Act of 1647 (Ornstein & Levine, 1993, p. 155). School supervisors during this era were respected local citizens whose function was to inspect schools to maintain strict standards for facilities and instruction.

This tradition of supervision by local inspection continued from the colonial period to the early 1800s, at which time various local government tax revenues financed the formation of school districts, and sometimes students paid a rate bill or tuition (Ornstein & Levine, 1993). Although elected officials managed the construction and maintenance of schools and raised tax revenue for their support, they acknowledged the need for district superintendents to take on the role of supervision of curriculum and instructional standards; the superintendents were considered to have more educational experience than local citizens. Teachers were hired by the elected school board, and certification "was a simple but chaotic process" (p. 171), because each community issued its own certificates and did not recognize the certificates of other districts.

By the 1840s, Horace Mann, a strong proponent of the common schools, recommended schooling for all children as a way to prepare the public for democracy, national identity, and purpose. Mann argued for teaching ethical, nonsectarian principles in schools and proposed providing public education to diverse populations that included large numbers of immigrants (Cremin, 1957). This helped increase school enrollment, particularly in the urban areas, and "school reform" became synonymous with establishing new strategies for organizational administration. The population shift also spawned the need for more teachers, thus establishing the normal school for teacher preparation (Gutek, 1991). For the field of supervision, this meant a new focus: adjusting managerial routines in the growing organization became the primary job of the administrator.

The 19th century ended with more dramatic economic and population changes predicated by the spread of industrialism and the end of the Civil War. As many one-room schoolhouses evolved into separate schools with grade levels, teachers had to change their instructional methods. Pressed to maintain high standards, supervisors adopted a new approach similar to the successful authoritarian approach used in industry. The superintendent, as the official head of the organization, was responsible for maintaining its efficiency; this meant inspecting teachers and their instructional practices.

The purpose of supervision during this era was to ensure efficiency by monitoring and overseeing curriculum and instruction and evaluating teacher performance and student achievement. Supervisors functioned primarily to instruct poorly prepared teachers to conform to standard practices. Inspection, often derided as "snoopervision," was the prevailing approach (Oliva, 1989, p. 5). According to Sullivan and Glanz (2005), literature of the period indicates that supervisors employed intuition, not technical knowledge, to assess teaching competency. Employees who were deemed inefficient and who seemingly could not be retrained were dismissed. The general tenor of the supervisor's role is well captured by a Massachusetts superintendent named Balliet, quoted in an 1894 National Educational Association Proceedings publication titled "What Can Be Done to Increase the Efficiency of Teachers in Actual Services?" Balliet stated that in order for a school to remain effective, it must "first, secure a competent superintendent; second, let him 'reform' all the teachers who are incompetent and can be 'reformed'; and third, bury the dead" (Sullivan & Glanz, 2005, p. 8). In this context and atmosphere, the supervisor gained high community status and respectability for his authority, even as teachers grew resentful of the supervisor's intrusiveness.

At this time, when the school size increased, a new layer of administration developed. Special supervisors were middle-level management, primarily women. They had no formal training in supervision and were assigned to assist less experienced teachers through subject-area coaching in penmanship, art, and spelling. A second group of supervisors, primarily men, received the title of general supervisors. They too lacked formal training and provided subject-area assistance in mathematics, science, and management duties. Sullivan and Glanz (2005) observe that the general supervisors often usurped the special supervisors' roles and evolved to become assistant managers. "General supervisors," they note, "gained wider acceptance simply because they were men" (p. 13). Supervision was taking a turn toward coaching, but this new direction was derailed by a cultural sense that running an organization was properly the business of men.

By 1900, school supervisors had become organizational managers whose job requirements did include evaluating teacher performance and monitoring student achievement. However, while supervision accomplished much in the area of improving the organization, little improvement in teaching and learning seemed to have been attributed to the role or leadership of supervisors.

Scientific Organizational Improvement: Supervision in the Early 1900s

By 1900, school supervisors were firmly entrenched as organizational managers responsible for evaluating teacher performance and monitoring student achievement. In 1916, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, in which he introduced scientific management as a way to conduct "a complete mental revolution on the part of people working under it" (Boone & Bowen, 1980, p. 35). Briefly, scientific management required careful selection of workers and subsequent development to support task accomplishment, collection of time- and task-data, worker incentives, and redivision of work to accommodate collaboration. According to Taylor, in the scientific management model, "the scientific selection of the workman and his progressive development represents a democracy, cooperation, a general division of work that will be profitable" (Boone & Bowen, 1980, p. 46).

In 1913, Franklin Bobbitt at the University of Chicago published an article titled "Some General Principles of Management Applied to the Problems of City-School Systems," in which he supported the application of scientific and control-oriented principles of supervision to schools. In 1924, James Hosic, a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, spoke out strongly against Bobbitt's support for scientific management, arguing that "teaching cannot be 'directed' the same way as bricklaying" (Sullivan & Glanz, 2005, p. 14). Hosic advocated that supervisors move away from any remaining autocratic tendencies and toward more collaborative approaches with teachers. Nevertheless, the popularity of applying scientific approaches to supervision led to the task of gathering data using rating scales to retain strong teachers and eliminate weak ones. Schools were viewed as factories that shaped and turned out products (educated persons), and teachers undoubtedly were viewed as the laborers assigned to the task.

To incorporate the findings of scientific management into education, supervisors used rating scales as an allegedly objective means for promoting the efficiency of the school operation. While the responsibility of supervision continued to be applied as a service to eliminate weak employees, it now did so for the purpose of scientifically improving schools as organizations. However, there were no uniform standards for teacher efficiency or agreed-upon criteria for excellent teaching, and reliability in the use of rating scales was very low. Not surprisingly, teachers and other educators widely criticized the use of rating scales. During the subsequent 20 years, publications from the National Education Association denounced the practice and attempted to remove inspection by rating from supervision.

A final footnote about the evolution of supervision during this era included one residual but critical feature of industrialization. Specialized occupations had become accepted as a way to generate improvements in any field, and this movement accentuated a need for supervisors to be recognized as specialized professionals. The quandary supervisors faced was that their training had been geared toward applying inspection and rating techniques (largely to support salary decisions, promotions, and dismissals) rather than toward how to work cooperatively with teachers to improve instruction (Glanz, 1991). In other words, the model for the specialized field of supervision was set in response to research in factory production efficiency rather than created as a catalyst for improving teaching and learning. The role of the principal was to be an authoritarian inspector specializing in skills necessary to reform or dismiss an employee rather than to be an expert in pedagogy, willing and able to provide useful and meaningful feedback to teachers to improve student performance.

Teacher Improvement and the Democratic Motive: Supervision from 1900 through Mid-Century

While social optimism prevailed in the early 1900s and industrialization led to scientific management, educational progressivism gained attention. John Dewey combined ideas about democracy with an educational science by recommending an experiential, "learning by doing" methodology and a course of study requiring students to apply skills and knowledge for social usefulness. Curriculum showed more tolerance for students' interests, shifting from centralized and prescribed to more child centered. These changes naturally initiated changes in teaching. The use of memorization techniques as the primary means for learning and, via testing, as a determining factor in measuring student achievement began to give way to a focus on problem solving. And educators began to talk about the need to adapt supervision to these new models.

In our opinion, a significant milestone in supervision history occurred in 1914, when Edward C. Elliott, a science teacher and superintendent of schools in Leadville, Colorado, recognized supervision's unique capacity for improving teaching methods. Elliott noted that the "tasks" of teaching students were not as clearly "accomplished" as in business, and he redefined supervision as "the democratic motive of American education" (as cited in Pajak, 1993, p. 2). Elliott advocated separating administrative tasks for efficiency and supervisory tasks for instilling creativity.

Supervisors during this time began to take on more curriculum work as proof of their instructional expertise and their willingness to collaborate with teachers. However, their new teacher support role was hampered by a new tendency toward standardization. In the increasingly affluent country, supervisors were required to ensure homogeneity yet differentiate for learners by applying curriculum prescribed by the superintendent and the community—a curriculum introduced first by The Committee of Ten in 1892 and strengthened by the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education in 1918 (Ornstein & Levine, 1993). Supervisors' efforts to support teachers were further hampered by the fact that educational success was commonly measured in rates of student attendance and completion—both of which had more to do with larger, societal factors than anything a school, supervisor, or teacher was or was not doing. So it was that "control" through alignment with administrative authoritarianism was the predominant descriptor of supervisors' work during the first two decades of the 20th century. However, Elliott's call for leadership through democracy would reemerge in latter decades to powerful effect.

There was another significant redefinition of supervision between the 1930s and the 1950s due largely to the dissonance created by the requirements for inspection and a new need for collaboration. Just as school organizations struggled to gain the reputation of being "efficient" in the eyes of the public, supervisors struggled to be recognized as valuable instructional leaders in the eyes of teachers. As the middle part of the 20th century brought increased urbanization and a wider range of employment opportunities, schools began focusing on educating students to take their place in the expanding job market. This stimulated a new mission for teachers and brought about a significant redefinition of supervision for principals. In 1931, A. S. Barr wrote that supervisors "must possess training in both the science of instructing pupils and the science of instructing teachers. Both are included in the science of supervision" (Sullivan & Glanz, 2005, p. 17).

Led by Romiett Stevens at Teachers College, Columbia University, teacher rating scales began to change to focus on improving instruction. Stevens supported the use of stenographic reports—verbatim accounts of classroom activities—as a more humanistic way to observe lessons and evaluate teacher efficiency than the previous practice of inspecting by "intuition." As these and other more democratic and professional supervisory procedures began to emerge, supervisors needed additional training in order to focus their work on improving instruction rather than just promoting and retaining teachers. This training included the exploration of democratic principles and collaboration techniques, and the importance of democratic relationships between supervisors and teachers was supported in an anthology of articles compiled by Robert R. Leeper (1969), then the director of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and the editor of Educational Leadership.

New Models for Changing Times: Supervision from 1960 through the 1990s

The 1960s saw the rise of a novel type of supervision in a response to a number of factors, including the increasing size and complexity of the school organization; new federal involvement through grants and programs; the rise of collective bargaining; an increase in teacher professional development opportunities as a result of Sputnik and the space race; and changes to new math, bilingual education, and other curriculum and instruction initiatives. Supervision in this era transformed to meet social needs, promoting individual respect for the supervisor, for the teacher, and, ultimately, for the learner.

One of the field's primary objectives became fostering leadership potential among teachers. As Pajak (1993) points out, the "teacher leadership" movement ironically faced adversity when another new development within the profession, collective bargaining, "effectively usurped the supervisor's traditional tools of group planning and problem solving. Teachers were no longer considered a source of creative ideas and solutions, but a problem of resistance that had to be overcome" (p. 5). Some believed collective bargaining principles effectively demoted teachers to a status similar to that of the 1800s, where they were expected to submit to authoritarian powers and conform for the good of the organization.

Let's pause now to take a closer look at three key developments that were especially critical in shaping supervision as the century came to a close: clinical supervision, the standards movement, and an increased focus on the learner.

The Introduction of Clinical Supervision

In the 1960s and 1970s, the authors of clinical supervision models refocused classroom learning and teaching by reintroducing democratic practices respectful of teachers. Morris Cogan (1973), a Harvard University professor considered to be the father of clinical supervision, proposed that supervision be a vehicle to disseminate pedagogical initiatives. He also suggested that teachers use self-analysis and self-direction while supervisors work in settings of face-to-face pre-conferences, classroom observations, and post-conferences. Robert Goldhammer (1969), Cogan's doctoral student, and Ralph Mosher and David Purpel (1972) emphasized teacher collegiality and self-supervision focusing on instructional strengths rather than deficiencies. Cogan and Goldhammer, especially, stressed that clinical approaches to supervision should be used only for the improvement of teaching and not for evaluation.

In his 1993 book Approaches to Clinical Supervision, Edward Pajak grouped clinical supervision models into four categories that reflected their basic tenets. The first category of original clinical models (those of Cogan, Goldhammer, and Mosher and Purpel) was followed by a category that Pajak termed humanistic/ artistic models, which included models proposed by Blumberg (1980) and Eisner (1982). In an environment of growing bureaucracy throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these models emphasized the establishment of trusting human relationships (Blumberg) and the development of teachers' unique talents (Eisner) as important for successful supervision. Thanks to the influence of these prominent researchers, strictly scientific approaches to supervision broadened to encourage the fostering of collegiality and personal concern. However, the 1980s rapidly shifted the emphasis of supervision back to task analysis, incorporating two more of Pajak's categories of clinical models: technical/didactic and developmental/reflective. These models took a more rational and scientific approach to examining and reflecting on teacher behavior related to student response.

Teaching Behavior and Student Response (1980s)

Madeline Hunter's (1980) supervision model kicked off the decade by encouraging supervisors to focus on teacher behavior as a direct influence on student response. Her recommendations and those of other contemporaneous researchers (Acheson & Gall, 1980; Glatthorn, 1984; McGreal, 1983) included revising teacher and supervisor training programs to incorporate learned, practiced, and perfected skills in pedagogy. The belief was that objective criteria of effective teaching did exist and were teachable.

Although this return to a scientific approach to supervision incorporated contemporary psychological research and technology, the procedures included the basic tenets of clinical and collegial methodology. The emphases on staff development and peer coaching were seen as viable means for improving teaching in order to improve learning (Joyce & Showers, 1988).

Pajak's final category of clinical models, developmental/reflective models, included the work of many researchers who emphasized that self-analysis and reflection on the part of teachers were critical to teaching success. This emphasis brought about the implementation of personal portfolios for professional growth.

Prominent individuals who conducted research during this time proposed that effective supervision requires understanding the developmental level of teachers regarding their decision making about teaching actions and student responses (Glickman, 1985) and emphasized the importance of teachers reflecting on and understanding the relationship between their teaching actions and their students' learning (Costa & Garmston, 1985, 1994). Both approaches require the supervisor to be aware of teachers' personal, humanistic concerns and take steps to guide teachers through reflective and decision-making processes that focus on the relationship between practices and student learning. Thus, light was beginning to shine on the essential need to consider the learner as a primary focus in both teaching and supervision.

A Focus on the Learner (The 1990s On)

The standards movement of the 1990s, designed to dramatically increase student and teacher accountability, should have profoundly affected supervision. Two national reports released in the 1980s, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (U.S. Department of Education National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (Carnegie Forum, 1986) blamed schools for mediocrity and called for increased student and teacher accountability. These reports fueled a national curriculum reform, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994 under the name Goals 2000. Two of the six goals related directly to student performance:

Goal 3: By the year 2000, American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy.

Goal 4: By the year 2000, U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics. (U.S. Department of Education National Education Goals Panel, 1994, p. ix)

At the time, many agreed that education prior to the 1990s had been largely a process of intention with continued hope of improvement. This new definition required concrete results, demonstrated through student learning and evidenced through analyses of student learning data, and the preferred method of dealing with these data was through the creation of learning standards.

The standards-based curriculum movement that led states to develop standards documents and to No Child Left Behind's nationwide testing and accountability measures ushered in the 21st century. Varied efforts were made to minimize learning gaps, especially those between disadvantaged minority students and their peers; strengthen schools; and improve staff development. These efforts led to the frequent convening of professionals for the purpose of analyzing test data related to standards. Linda Law, director of secondary curriculum for New York's Baldwinsville School District observed:

The data retreats, unfortunately, only confirmed what we already knew about student performance. Gathering educators into committees to view congeries of district test data did not provide a solution to fill the void between data and the improvement goal.

We treated the data retreat as the solution; supervisors were called upon to inform teachers of progress or lack thereof. Looking back, we can see that supervisors did not have the training to act upon using the annual test results to reduce the gaps by changing classroom practices through supervision. We were not trained to improve the dialogue with teachers about teaching and learning. (Personal conversation with J. Pollock, 2007)

Ironically, these analyses of test data are conducted separately from classroom observations, in which supervisors use lengthy checklists to monitor teacher behaviors. The checklists conjure up memories of the rating scales prevalent in the early 1900s, the era of scientific management. And the message to supervisors—to determine the extent to which teachers comply with standards-based assessment—reminds us of efficiency language and unfavorable "inspection." The question educators must now ask is whether the requirement that principals first inspect the work of teachers to see if they are addressing standards in instructional planning and then infer that those who have done so have improved their students' learning until the test scores show differently has actually turned supervision back to what it was a century ago.

21st Century Models: Supervision for Improved Learning

The need to advance all students' learning, coupled with contemporary research findings about the power of instructional strategies and how critical feedback is to improving learning, leads us to the 21st century approach to elevating the importance of supervision.

Two noted works currently used by supervisors are Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 2007) and The Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through: Changing School Supervisory Practice One Teacher at a Time (Downey, Steffy, English, Frase, & Poston, 2004). Both approaches encourage principals to collaborate and help teachers learn how to reflect upon their own professional practice. Both stress the importance of improving teaching to improve learning. However, the process of analyzing data in these and other learning-centered approaches to supervision (Aseltine, Faryniarz, & Rigazio-DeGilio, 2006; Tucker & Stronge, 2005) primarily uses summative student data rather than a formative approach that concurrently analyzes student learning progress and teaching practices on a lesson-by-lesson basis.

Although standards-based supervision discussions are becoming more widespread, it is usually periodic performance indicators that define student learning. Too often, a final test result or a final subjective grade is used to report student achievement, with the student often unaware of learning progress until that final assessment is announced.

A Supervisory Tool to Improve Learning

We asked the question earlier in this chapter of why supervisory visits to classrooms are often dreaded and seen as occasional events of perfunctory judgment. What we didn't state is that supervisory visits to classrooms may be just as uncomfortable for supervisors as they are for teachers. What teachers and supervisors sometimes forget is that they share the same primary goal: to improve student learning. Teachers must believe supervisors are not in their classrooms to "inspect" them, and supervisors must be equipped with the tools they need to give teachers accurate, helpful feedback that will support sound, formative instructional decision making. If these components of the supervision process are not in place, then a disconnect occurs that fosters resentment on the part of teachers and unwelcome feelings (at best) or feelings of failure (at worst) on the part of supervisors.

We can see that the role of supervision in our country's history has progressed from oversight to collaboration, despite some stagnations or even reversals along the way. We have moved from inspection to the use of rating scales designed to promote organizational efficiency, to the inclusion of democratic and cooperative approaches, and back to a form of rating and inspection through standards-based criteria checklists. While the primary goal of supervision is improving student achievement, the focus of supervision has changed from the organization itself to teacher learning and finally, now, to student learning.

We believe that the supervisory structure discussed in this book and based on the Teaching Schema for Master Learners allows a teacher and supervisor to cooperatively apply scientific principles about student learning. Supervisors can share in improving student learning by observing critical decisions that teachers make during their teaching, cooperating in planning and reflecting upon those decisions, and using classroom and test data to determine effectiveness and make changes. The tools and approaches we discuss in this book can be used in a clinical approach, with pre-conferences, classroom observations, and post-conferences. The Schema includes specific, sequenced steps that encourage reflection and professional development. In other words, it will complement, not replace, most existing supervisory models.

A critical component that separates our proposed supervisory approach from others is that we encourage daily, ongoing feedback from teachers to students about students' learning progress; it is important that this feedback be tied to lesson goals and objectives. Teachers' pedagogical decisions affect students' classroom performance and achievement gains on a daily basis. Effective supervisory work with teachers examines this influence and determines how to use daily progress in student learning to inform teaching decisions.

Supervision in the latter decades of the 20th century primarily focused on teacher behaviors, assuming that if instruction improved, student learning would likewise improve. A closer look at student achievement data reveals the flaw in this axiom. However, the research about learning indicates that a supervisor can take a pivotal role in ensuring that students learn. Supervision that includes useful feedback to teachers and assists teachers in providing frequent and useful feedback to students contributes greatly to improved student achievement. The supervisor's role is to implement effective tools in coaching and to work cooperatively with teachers to make decisions based on researched pedagogical practices. The Teaching Schema for Master Learners—specifically, each of its components, referred to as GANAG—is such a tool.