The Administration of Supervision Practices and Teacher Reaction to Them

Abstract

In this study, the author explores the supervisory approaches of a school’s administrators to determine whether hybridized approaches may increase managerial effectiveness. The author begins by separating administrator’s approaches into three general categories: the democratic approach, the dictatorial approach, and the laissez faire approach. He then uses survey methods to explore teachers’ perceptions of their supervisors’ use of these approaches. The author presents his subjects with thirteen scenarios describing various supervisory methods and asks them to generally respond or choose to leave their answer blank. The author found that his subjects strongly preferred democratic supervisory methods to the other two, however a significant number of teachers perceived administrators’ dictatorial methods as more positive than laissez faire methods. The author suggests that hybridizing democratic and dictatorial methods may prove effective. Directions for further research include investigating teacher perceptions from a multi-school subject pool.