Supervising Effective Teaching: Conceptual Tools for Getting Started

Abstract

he school principal is expected to be a near miracle worker on many fronts at the same time: school-community relations, finance and budgeting, organizational management, staff development, and student discipline. Areas that are almost always included are supervision of instruction and teacher evaluation. The ordinary principal-working long hours and often on weekends-moves from one problem area to another, sometimes without a sense of priorities. While such onthe-spot decision making is exciting and perhaps at times exhilarating, the astute administrator knows that somehow instructional leadership must be given top priority: the principal should get into classrooms, know what is going on in them, and help teachers improve learning opportunities for their students. Katz (1974) provides a framework for the tools that building principals can use when he points out that administrators employ, in varying combinations, three sets of teachable skills: technical, human, and conceptual. Technical skills consist of those normally emphasized in the job description: scheduling, staff selection and assignments, and day-to-day operations. Human skills consist of the principal's attitudes toward and relationships with co-workers: the widely varied behaviors through which the principal secures and maintains the cooperation of other persons engaged in the school enterprise. Conceptual skills are the most abstract of the three. Essentially, they are thinking skills-how the administrator views the world, the organization, and its mission; and how different aspects of the situation might best be han-