Chapter 15 - Professionalism, paradigm shifts, and language teacher supervision

Summary

This book began with some definitions of language teacher supervision and an overview of the roles supervisors take. You may agree that “supervision has a rather undistinguished history, a variety of sometimes incompatible definitions, a very low level of popular acceptance, and many perplexing and challenging problems” (Anderson, 1982:181). Nevertheless, I hope that you will also agree that language teacher supervision can be a career path worth pursuing.

In Chapter 1 we examined a partial inventory of professional supervisors' roles and skills. In Chapter 2 we considered attitude and awareness in teacher-supervisor relationships. Next, in Chapter 3 we investigated autonomy and authority as these constructs relate to supervision. In Chapter 4 we first asked whether supervisors should observe teachers, and if so, whether they should collect data during observations. We then examined manual and electronic data collection in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. In Chapter 7 we considered the post-observation conference in general, and then in Chapter 8 we focused on mitigation in supervisory discourse. In Chapter 9 we reviewed language teacher evaluation, which formed the backdrop to our discussion of criteria for teacher evaluation in Chapter 10. Finally, in Chapters 11 to 14, we discussed the challenges and rewards of language teacher supervisors' work with four groups: preservice teachers, teaching assistants, in-service teachers, and non-native-speaking teachers.

We will now examine the concept of professionalism and consider some alternatives to traditional, hierarchical teacher-supervisor relationships in the context of a paradigm shift in education.