Critical reflection for Supervisors

 

The imperative for professionals to critically reflect on the effectiveness of their everyday work is a widely understood foundation for continuously improving practice. This is no less the case for supervisors who are most often working autonomously in difficult practice environments. This work is inevitably centred on making a large number of significant evaluative decisions, providing mentoring and advice and negotiating the improvement of the work of pre-service teachers.

However, what are the core assumptions that we are using to make decisions? Most often they are largely intuitive or unconscious, particularly as we gain more experience in the filed (which encourages to rely more on our developed intuition drawn from previous experiences).

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It is therefore important that we periodically hunt those assumptions that underpin our practice. This is important because it can broaden our perspective, challenge our (often habitual) responses and allow us to investigate new possibilities.

One framework that can help us hunt these assumptions that underpin our approach to supervision is that of Brookfield’s (1999) critically reflective lenses. Although this framework was originally designed to reflect on teaching, it equally has application to the work of supervisors.

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The essence of this framework is that:

• understanding our work from different perspectives (including better understanding our own approach to the task) can prompt a broader understanding of the work we are doing; and

• confronting the tensions (and sometimes contradictory pressures) of supervision can help us think through better ways of managing, developing and advocating for the work

 

This framework advocates looking at supervisory work through four distinct lenses:

• our self (or the effect of our own learning autobiography as a learner)

• our pre-service teachers (whose voice can tell us much about the effectiveness of what we do)

• our peers (who can disrupt our certainties and introduce new ways of seeing)

• literature on supervision (that can broaden our understanding of what we do and how we can most effectively do it )