Annotated Table of Contents. Supervision: Authority

Teaching English, How To.... by Raymond Stopper

Part Seven: Supervision

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.