The Supervisor Role: Gatekeeper or Coach?

Dr. Keith Walters:

Okay. So I have been working on understanding teacher development since I was in my doctorate in the 1990s. And I have taken a very holistic synthesis approach to understanding the research behind teacher development, looking at things like emotional intelligence, positive psychology, core value reflections, professional learning communities. The list goes on and on and on. It’s very cross disciplinary in nature. And there’s two big things I want to highlight as we go into the research that seems simple, but when we take a step back are things that we oftentimes forget. Number one, most clinical supervision tends to be reactive. You tend to focus on rehashing something. Our protocol is built on being proactive. The second huge element within our protocol is this notion that if we’re going to create successful teachers, we need to help our new teachers understand how to positively navigate disappointment and frustration.

And those two little huge tidbits are the heart of what we’re doing. It’s a major paradigm shift that has a lot of power. So to understand how this paradigm shift works, we began to look at what are some of the tensions that educators face. One tension that supervisors face is, am I a friend of the person I’m supervising or am I a teacher? And sometimes we have supervisors who are reteaching our coursework during clinical practice because they think that’s their job. And then we also have supervisors with toxic, toxic positivity where you swear that their candidate is walking on water even though every kid in their class is out of their seat. So that’s a tension. The other tension that we looked at when we talk about supervisors is my role to be an assessor to determine whether or not you are doing everything correctly according to your state standards, or is my job to be an encourager.

And as we looked at this, we began to go, these tensions actually create a good grid matrix. Now the next thing that you begin to look at as you create the grid matrix is what are the different roles that a supervisor plays and the roles in the bottom left where we are, encourage your friend, that’s the caregiver. And then up on the top right, you have the teacher assessors, and that’s the gatekeeper. And what we’ve noticed is that most supervisors hang out in these two areas. And both of these areas when we talk to candidates, are actually ineffective in building candidate agency. And as we begin to look at this, what we begin to realize is the power comes when you are a coach or a project manager. And the promise is when you get down into that bottom portion where I am a co-learner with my candidate focus on advocating for equity.

So when we begin to look at the supervisor set of the supervisor role, we begin there’s, we realize there’s a huge untapped area that brings power to supervision.