The purpose of this study is to determine how school supervision should be improved with the change of educational environment. To understand how supervisors recognize their business and how their roles can be re-established, this study analyzes five ...
The purpose of this study is to determine how school supervision should be improved with the change of educational environment. To understand how supervisors recognize their business and how their roles can be re-established, this study analyzes five research problems as follows:
First, it analyzes supervisor's major responsibilities and determines their problems.
Second, it analyzes the type of business that can be reduced, eliminated, created or expanded.
Third, it suggests a way to enhance school supervision.
Fourth, it focuses on supervisor's job recognition about educational policy evaluation and explores its ripple effect.
Fifth, it investigates ways for re-establishing supervisor's roles within the new revised educational system.
To solve these problems, a questionnaire was prepared for 154 supervisors in Gangwon-do according to the type of school, educational career, the experience of school administrator and working organization. The collected data was analyzed by SPSSWIN 14.0 program and verification was used to find the difference between groups.
The results of this study are summarized as follows.
First, the supervisors' current major business is 'to deal with documents and public services related to education'. Classroom supervision, which they think of as major business, is treated as a minor business. Accordingly they are experiencing a conflict between the ideal and the real. Supervisors especially think that visiting and evaluating schools are very important supervision activities. However, school supervision is conducted in an indirect and formal way with conference with administrators and paper evaluation, in addition to classroom observation and discussions with teachers.
Second, supervisors were generally satisfied with their job, but very few of them were satisfied. Most of supervisors answered that they had professionalism as a supervisor but they didn't think they had enough. I analyzed that their responses were most likely to come from poor working conditions. Nevertheless, supervisors preferred to be evaluated themselves as 'classroom supervision professionals'. 90.3% of them answered that the basic problems of supervision were administration centered organization system and their unprofessional heavy workload and it showed their reality of supervision.
Third, supervisors think their roles have to be changed. They want to have professionalism about their business, to increase the number of supervisors, to improve working conditions and to be granted autonomy and independence. They also want to abolish their administrative roles such as document processing and managing and supervising roles, and to strengthen counseling and supporting roles as well as curriculum evaluating roles. It reflects their aspiration toward counseling, supporting and evaluating roles freed from managing and supervising roles. They also overwhelmingly want to move to other administration department besides supervising work to improve their professionalism. For this, they need to arrange workshops for strengthening their professionalism, to support the development of supervision methods and to increase the number of supervisors.
Fourth, most supervisors want to reestablish their roles. They perceive that they are mainly doing 'operating work' in the process of developing, operating and evaluating educational policy. However, they think of educational policy evaluation positive and that it would be helpful to re-establish their roles if it became their major business.
Through the study above, my conclusions are as follows.
First, Supervisors recognized that major roles are school visiting evaluation and supporting, teacher's instruction supporting, conference and consultation.
Second, Supervisors pointed out that major problems are administration business centered organization system, supervisor's non-professional business excess and few of supervisors.
Third, Supervisors recognized that they wanted role improvement, support school with the professional abilities. For this, it needed training for professional abilities, school inspecting method supporting, and increasing of supervisors.
Fourth, Supervisors recognized that a realm of school inspecting is educational policy examination. It needed supporting educational policy for school, supporting teacher's professional abilities, educational policy assessment work, and devising a proper plan by reporting school problems through consistent monitoring and demanding its improvement.