Supervision for Growth: A Practitioner's Perspective.

A successful program for staff development focused on moral development will view teachers as growing adults who will become more professional and successful as they are provided with a work environment that demands choice, automony, dialogue, and reflection. Such a working environment comes from the close collaboration of the administrator, the teaching staff, and the students. This paper describes a staff development effort which moved the faculty closer to the ideal of a new professional culture centered upon student learning. While this model examines policies within schoolhouse walls, it does have the power to effect policy changes outside of the individual school since it seeks to establish a richer understanding of the teaching profession. A case study is given of a faculty workshop, organized around the theme of developing new norms to enhance the professionalization of the teaching staff by attending more responsibly to students' needs. Three dominant areas which needed to be addressed by the faculty were identified: (1) the students thought the teachers were unfair in grading; (2) instructional styles needed to be enhanced and expanded; and (3) the faculty endorsed both short and long term responsibilities for professional development. Within this presentation, supervision by the principal is seen as an obligation which seeks to promote the moral growth of the staff by attending to issues of injustice as perceived by the school community. (JD)