Redefining Supervision: A Joint Inquiry Into Preparing School-Based Leaders to Supervise for Equity

Abstract

This article documents two professors’ inquiry into a lesson on supervising for equity in a supervisor preparation course. Through an iterative process of lesson design, lesson implementation, analysis of student work, and pedagogical discussion, we refine the lesson. Our study sheds light on the potential challenges of preparing supervisors to promote equity, offers pedagogical insights to leadership programs invested in instilling a commitment to social justice, and reflects the promise of collaborative faculty inquiry for curriculum development. The study contains implications for educational leadership faculty and program coordinators as well as facilitators of professional development for school leaders.

Leading for equity: how principals experience professional learning

“…Principals were able to share feedback with their network which cemented long-term mutual interactions for support. This also helped address the gap between leaders’ beliefs and behaviors highlighted previously by researchers (Garver and Maloney, 2020; Mayger and Provinzano, 2020; Miller and Martin, 2015). Here, we found social learning theory to be particularly insightful as principals explicitly articulated the benefit of interaction between what they learned from peers, how they applied the lessons, beliefs, and behaviors, and how those aspects were reciprocal in their learning.…”

“…As such, professional learning led by principals to normalize equity conversations and vulnerability were key (Galloway and Ishimaru, 2020). Researchers showed a disconnect between leaders' beliefs and behaviors, in part due to a lack of specific training to enact those beliefs, thus professional learning should increase capacity in leaders' actions (Garver and Maloney, 2020; Mayger and Provinzano, 2020; Miller and Martin, 2015). Leaders were trained in instruction but did not know how to concurrently address issues of equity (Mayger and Provinzano, 2020; Miller and Martin, 2015).…”

The Improvement of Elementary School Teachers Through Web-Based Clinical Supervision

“…Initiatives to improve teacher abilities are very important to be developed (Gibbs et al, 2016). Because this is a seed that will soon be developed into awareness-based teacher capacity building activities, these activities are at the core of the clinical supervision concept (Garver & Maloney, 2020).…”