Examining the Mismatch between Learner-Centered Teaching and Teacher-Centered Supervision

Abstract

Student teacher supervision, with few exceptions, remains a teacher-centered enterprise. Typical supervision policies, procedures, and forms focus on teachers’ observable behaviors. They grant authority to the perceptions of the supervisor/teacher. The concerns, questions, professional knowledge, and deliberative processes of the student teacher/learner are secondary, if they are considered at all. In this self-study, the authors explore alternatives to teacher-centered supervision by first supervising each other in their own learner-centered college classrooms, then extrapolating what was learned to their student teaching supervision. Data analysis yielded themes of responsibility, power, and purpose; challenges to the lesson as the unit of analysis and standard sources of data on student teachers’ work; and the importance of the social construction of roles and meanings. The authors’ intent is not to put forward yet another model of student teacher supervision but to describe a process of coconstructing supervision with student teachers so that the student teacher/learner is at the center.