While university supervision of student teaching is almost as much a given as the field work component itself in preservice training, many (Dewey, 1904; lannaccone, 1963;Silberman, 1970;Lortie, 1975) argue that students, during their clinical work, abandon university &dquo;theory&dquo; in favor of the &dquo;practice&dquo; of their cooperating teachers. At Washington University (in St. Louis), however, the staff of STEP-a field-based elementary teacher training program-has developed a model of supervision which appears to foster theory-practice links of a varied and potent nature. This paper will describe the supervisory model, which involves what we have labeled &dquo;situational teaching,&dquo; contrast the model with other models, and focus upon the theory-practice breakthroughs it has generated.Although the entire article is devoted to an explication of the model, a brief introductory remark on the expression &dquo;situational teaching&dquo; might serve to orient the reader. Within the expression, &dquo;teaching&dquo; means systematic and deliberate instruction; &dquo;situational&dquo; means that this instruction occurs within the context of the school setting (or &dquo;situation&dquo;). Further, &dquo;situational&dquo; suggests that the instruction is marked by an attempt to link university theory directly to some particulars of the novice's classroom practice (or &dquo;situation&dquo;)-e.g., the lesson, the children, and the perspectives of the cooperating teacher and other school personnel.Supervision: Three Theoretical Models Perhaps the clearest way to begin describing situational teaching is to recall briefly that teacher educators and others have persistently questioned how, by whom, and for what purpose preservice supervision should be conducted, and they have responded with differing theoretical and practical responses to these questions. Speaking to the &dquo;how&dquo; and &dquo;for what&dquo; questions, Mosher and Purpel (1972), for example, describe three distinctive theoretical models. The first, &dquo;clinical supervision,&dquo; has the primary aim of &dquo;the improvement of instruction.&dquo; When translated into supervisory tasks, this approach involves &dquo;planning for, observation, analysis and treatment of the teacher's classroom performance&dquo; (p. 78). Clinical supervision focuses on &dquo;what and how teachers teach as they teach&dquo; and aims at &dquo;developing in beginners and in experienced teachers a conviction and a value: that teaching, as an intellectual and social act, is subject to intellectual analysis&dquo; (p. 79). This analysis of teaching involves &dquo;objectivity in perception and criticism of the teaching performance and acceptance of such criticism&dquo; as well as &dquo;systematic, disciplined, and practical thinking about the wide range of factors which affect the process of formal instruction and its outcomes&dquo; (p. 81).In contrast to the emphasis on objectivity in clincial supervision, the emphasis in a second model, &dquo;ego counseling,&dquo; falls on the...

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Legislated learning describes accurately the assumptions underlying educational legislation in Florida from 1976 to 1985. This study explores the failure of teachers to accept models of legislated learning imposed on them. While 86.7% of teachers surveyed identified "the times I know I have `reached' a student or group of students and they have learned" as the most salient intrinsic reward in teaching, 74% of teachers interviewed found legislated learning as questioning competency, limiting the scope of teachers' work and/or political interference. Instead of creating an incentive of a better educational environment, legislated learning, according to interviewees, functioned as a disincentive to these teachers.

Cohn and Gellman focus on a developmental approach to preservice supervision, which includes five different models: ego counseling, group, clinical, "first aid," and "situational teaching."The authors argue that there are three different phases in the development of a student teacher and that different models of supervision are appropriate for each phase. oday, as perhaps never before, N there is an effort to rethink t teacher education as part of a larger commitment to improve the quality of education offered in our schools. Toward that end, many old and new images of the nature of teaching and the good or effective teacher have surfaced. One image that has persisted over the years is that of teacher as reflective practitioner or inquirer (Dewey, 1904;Schaefer, 1967;Schon, 1983). While many teacher educators clearly hold &dquo;inquiry&dquo; as a value (Tom, 1985), inquiry-oriented programs differ considerably depending on one's area of emphasis or definition of inquiry (Zeichner, 1983). For our purposes, &dquo;inquiry&dquo; involves the raising of questions as to what is appropriate teacher action in any given situation. The emphasis on inquiry in teacher education is predicated on the assumption that teaching is a complex and normative activity that requires continual decision making and problem solving. Because there is, as Tom (1984) argues, &dquo;no one best way,&dquo; teachers must learn to be inquirers who can make connections between the theory and methods that are available to them and the practical situations they encounter in differing contexts.For more than a decade, several of us in the education department at Washington University have worked to develop an organizational structure, a curriculum, an instructional mode, and a supervisory approach which would foster the development of a reflective practitioner. The primary vehicle has been a professional semester that offers methods courses and student teaching concurrently. As students experience simultaneously the realities and practices of the classroom and the educational theories of the academy, the aim is for students to inquire into and seek meaningful relationships between the two worlds.In this article we choose to concentrate primarily on the supervisory approach in the elementary professional semester as it contributes to inquiry.Our choice is based upon the belief that the pedagogy of preservice teacher education in general and of supervision in particular has been long overlooked.Because the various components of the professional semester are purposefully and tightly integrated, it is difficult to isolate one aspect of the program for examination without discussing others. We begin, therefore, by providing some brief background on our School-based Teacher Education Program (STEP) that is essential for understanding how the supervisory approach works. Next we describe and analyze five different supervisory models that comprise our overall developmental approach to supervision. We conclude with a brief consideration of this approach in the c...