The supervisory function of principles exists for evaluating data, offering feedback to teachers, watching classrooms collaboratively, and establishing more powerful educational systems, to mention a few of their primary tasks. To penetrate the school’s environment, clinical oversight is used, which is a direct and focused approach intended to assist instructors in understanding and improving their teaching (Sergiovanni & Green, 2014). Yet, an alternative to conventional and formalized clinical supervision techniques exists, which is peer supervision.
For peer supervision, teachers collaborate with their peers and do a casual study on each other’s practices. Peer supervision has to go beyond instructional monitoring to also include conversation, idea exchange, cooperative lesson creation, and other similar operations in order to achieve more efficiency (Sergiovanni & Green, 2014). It can be maximized by providing training and bonuses for the teachers that engage in the practice. It is also essential that principals encourage teachers’ independency in their practices rather than limit them by strict guidance.
The guidance could be given via coaching, which supposes that principals examine the teacher’s performance, assist teachers in researching subjects of interest, provide criticisms of teachers’ practices, and act as role models of successful teaching. The coaching strategy can improve instruction if the principal sets goals of the practice in advance, maintains the planned activities, collects data in the process, and reflects on the results to refine the teacher’s work. After that, in collaboration with the teacher, one can define the methods for improving practice and rectifying discipline issues by doing additional research and adapting it to the school settings. Finally, coaching is applicable for improving the teacher-parent relationship if the principal participates in face-to-face meetings and evaluates the teachers’ behavior, after which provides feedback.
References
Sergiovanni, T., & Green, R. (2014). The principalship: A reflective practice perspective (7th ed.). Pearson.