Annotated Table of Contents, Chapters 27 - 30

Part Seven: Supervision.
What are the characteristics of a successful supervisor of language arts?

Chapter 27. Supervision Lesson #1. Listen. Why is listening important to successful leadership? So much of success in leadership comes from listening to others and helping them carry through on their ideas. My willingness to listen to others was probably my greatest leadership strength, but at the end of my career as language arts supervisor, K-12, my failure to listen was the cause of my greatest mistake. After learning about my experience in refusing to listen, maybe the reader can avoid making a similar mistake.

Chapter 28. Supervision Lesson #2. Inservice. How can teacher inservice programs be improved? When I took courses in education, I noted that professors often lectured about teaching practices without using the techniques themselves. For example, instructors would recommend that teachers individualize their instruction but would not individualize their own teacher education classes. From my first position as an administrator, I've made it a fundamental principle to teach teachers as I wanted them to teach their students. An example of how I “practiced what I preached” occurred in a workshop for teachers new to a large suburban school district.

Chapter 29. Supervision Lesson #3. Change. What is needed for successful change in education? During my years in education, I have watched administrators make changes because of prevailing enthusiasms in the profession. The use of learning centers, behavioral objectives, whole language, the writing process—all of these changes were, in my experience, imposed on teachers from above. All were based on some good ideas, but all had some harmful effects as well. And the results of pressure for change on the staff were about what one would expect: a small core of enthusiasts embraced the change; the large majority went along with it but not enthusiastically, and, as soon as the pressure was off, dropped the procedure from their teaching; and a minority fought the change because they felt that it was not right, that it could even hurt students.
In this chapter, I discuss what happened when the need for change was clearly understood by just about everybody. But even with a clearly defined need for change, watch out for the side effects. Evaluation is necessary to help avoid and correct the problems that are inevitable with change.

Chapter 30. Supervision Lesson #4. Authority. Does leadership without authority work? The trouble with Mary was grammar—not her use of it but her teaching of it. The setting was a junior high school in the mid-1960s. My role as instructional consultant in the building was to help teachers improve their instruction—but I had no authority to demand change. Whatever change I was able to accomplish had to occur because of my personality and methods of persuasion.
One morning, the principal came storming into my office.. He was angry. He had just come from Mary Jones’s English class with seventh graders. She had been teaching, no, drilling, the students in grammar. “What is a noun? What is a verb?” etc.
“Ray,” he said, “I haven’t seen teaching like that since I was in grammar school a long time ago! Some kids actually had their heads down on their desks and were sleeping. Try to show her another way to teach that stuff.”
Then he strode out of my office, his job done; mine was just beginning.