Our readings so far have shown the importance of supervision in achieving clinically-rich teacher preparation education. This makes university supervisors the pivot of PDS in PSTs preparation. That is, appropriate implementation of PDS in PST preparation requires professional personnel who have the technical-know-how (skilled and knowledgeable university supervisors and CTs) in order to give the required professional training to the PSTs) hence, the importance of pedagogical skills in both pre-service and in-service supervision (Burns & Badiali, 2013).
From the first article for this week’s readings, this very group of people (university supervisors) are the undervalued party in the teacher preparation institutions thereby overlooking the training that helps equip them for effective functioning. I connected so much with this article in that I am a typical example of the above problem in that because I have been supervising PSTs since the beginning of my doctoral program, yet I do not have enough pedagogical skills that enable me to function effectively. Through the lens of this course, I can say that I have just (this semester) started my PST supervision journey because I am now learning to become effective PST supervisor. I personalized their research question (What pedagogical skills do Joyce use as she supervise in a PDS context?). As I was reading their findings, this questions kept ringing in mind’s ear. As asserted by the authors, ‘The knowledge base for supervision draws up the knowledge bases of teaching and teacher education’ implying that our knowledge base determine how we go about our work. Reflecting on this, I realized that our college (College of Education which is a clinically-rich teacher education and advocates for PDS) need to intensify its training of university supervisor to enable it use effective trained/professional supervisors who have the pedagogical skills for PDS in PST supervision.
The pedagogical skills which the findings shown to be vital to supervisors especially university supervisors in clinically-rich teacher preparation institutions were noticing, ignoring, intervening, pointing, unpacking and processing. As I was reflecting on these pedagogical skills, I noticed that even some of the pedagogical skills that I deem as basic in supervision like noticing (ability to distinguish critical incidents from other incidents during observation), pointing (drawing another person’s attention to a specific critical incident), unpacking (breaking down of a complex critical incident into meaningful and simpler components with supervisor’s reflection on the identified critical incident) and processing (reflection on the critical incident through conversation) are not as basic as regarded. From the authors discussion, I could see that some supervisors including I do not understand the entailment of the pedagogical skills fully so we just perform some aspect of it and leave the rest. For example, I have been using only the supervisor-centered for unpacking and processing all this while until this semester. Because we do not have the full understanding of the skills, we usually use the aspect we are used to at every situation without varying it to suit the situation at hand thereby making us fix square peg in a round hole. I think my current inquiry problem as having link with the ‘supervisor-facilitated-processing.
My past experience in supervision (seeing supervision as just evaluation) makes me think that ignoring is a skill most supervisors who see supervision as judgmental lack because we always want to have things for criticism so we hardly ignore (always want to take action). Intervening is something I sparingly do in my supervision work because I have the belief that if I do it, I will be embarrassing the intern or supervisee. I usually wait till the lesson is done before I point it out to the supervisee at the pointing stage. From the reading, I have seen that it is a skill I need to develop so that I could use it effectively to benefit both the supervisee and the students he/she teaches.
As evidenced in the readings for this course, supervisors can perform effectively if they have these three essential skills: technical, interpersonal, and the pedagogical (which falls under principle one of the guiding principles in PDS supervision model) and apply them appropriately. That is, the appropriate application of these skills would help to achieving the main goal of supervision in clinically-rich teacher preparation institution: to improve professional learning of both PSTs and ISTs which is targeted at improving students learning.
Reference
Burns, R. W., & Badiali, B. (2013). Identifying pedagogical skills of supervisors: Unearthing
the intricacies and complexities of learning to supervise. Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the council of Professors of Instructional Supervision in State College, PA:
The Penn State University.