Coaching - A Formative Process
Training Module 2 : Supervision for Teacher Growth - A Formative Process
This overview provides basic information about supervision for teacher growth and can serve as a basic overview. Supervision for teacher growth is a complex skill requiring training and practice. Principals, early childhood directors, and instructional coaches should seek thorough training in formative supervision strategies.
What is Supervision for Teacher Growth?
Supervision for Teacher Growth occurs when an individual serves as an instructional coach to a teacher and helps him/her reflect on practice and make informed plans for improvement. As the title suggests, the purpose is to promote growth in professional practice.
Supervision for Teacher Growth concerns how principals, early childhood directors, mentors, or instructional coaches observe teachers, gather teaching data, and conduct post-observation conferences to help teachers reflect on and grow in their ministries. The recorded data from observations and coaching conversations provide context for individual ministry development plans. In this way, teacher observations and coaching conversations are the engine that drive continual reflection and improvement.
The Big Picture
Faithful teachers in called ministry strive to continually grow in their abilities to serve God’s people. The WELS Teaching Standards and the WELS Ministry Development Plans are simply tools in a process of continual reflection upon and growth in teaching. Supervision for Teacher Growth utilizes the standards and informs ministry development plans.
Supervision for Teacher Growth fosters reflection by providing teachers with a second perspective. The WELS Teaching Standards and its continuum are useful for teacher reflection, but finding one’s place on the continuum is difficult. Everyone has blind spots, causing one to notice some aspects of teaching performance and miss others. People need help seeing themselves within the context of the big picture. An observer can capture data about one’s teaching and reflect it back to him, so he can more clearly see where he fits on the continuum and can continually improve.
How is Supervision for Teacher Growth Different than Supervision for Teacher Evaluation?
Teacher Growth is formative. It is entirely about teacher reflection and improvement while Teacher Evaluation is about rating performance. Rating, evaluating, or grading has no place in formative supervision because it hinders growth. A teacher being evaluated only wants to pass and is not concerned about improvement. An honest conversation about teaching is stifled when one or both parties know that any shortcomings may be used to rate the teacher in a report. Therefore, teacher growth can only occur in the absence of evaluation.
The following chart summarizes how supervision for growth and evaluation are different.
