Instructional Supervision and Curriculum Monitoring: Reinterpreting the Principal’s Role through the Arts of Inquiry

Abstract

The gulf between educational leadership theory and contemporary curriculum scholarship is becoming increasingly problematic now that principals have been legally mandated to add curriculum monitoring to their duties as instructional leaders. Lacking familiarity with curriculum theory and practice, many overburdened administrators are turning to Management by Walking Around (MBWA) as a way of dealing with their ever burgeoning list of responsibilities. This article briefly reviews a particular MBWA model, the Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through (Downey et al. 2004) and then interprets it through the lens of Henderson and Kesson’s (2004) arts of inquiry, a heuristic developed for helping curriculum workers think through the current multitude of reform proposals. This provides one example of the way that dialogue between the fields of curriculum studies and educational leadership may augment possibilities for lasting and positive reform of instructional supervision.