http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/308989869

Supervision as human relations

"What shall we include in a textbook on supervision? What is school supervision anyhow? What distinguishes it from the rest of education? We have been told that supervision concerns itself with the improvement of instruction, but what educational field would dare not be interested in bettering teaching and teaching conditions? Supervision must therefore treat with a unique phase of the improvement of instruction effort. This phase cannot involve coordination of the school organization because that is included in administration. It cannot be the development of content and the creation of method because these are the jurisdictions of curriculum. It cannot include the measurement of the effectiveness of teaching because this is the province of evaluation. And supervision cannot consider physical facilities without poaching upon the territory of school plant planning. This leaves us one large area still uncovered. It is that area of education which concerns itself with the dynamics of teacher personality within the teaching environment--the area of study which explores teachers' needs and drives; which investigates the techniques for redirecting and submerging those needs and drives which are antagonistic to good instruction and the techniques for inducing and stimulating those needs and drives which are conducive to improved teaching behavior. We shall call this area "supervision." Supervision is related to the education of teachers as child psychology is related to the education of children. It is the psychology of the individual differences of teachers as these differences influence their teaching activity. The study of supervision does not involve itself with the nature of the content to be taught or the method employed in teaching this content. Supervision is not evaluation. Supervision tries to determine how to stimulate teachers to improve their teaching, attempts to fit method to teacher personality, and encourages teacher growth. Supervision is a human relations study which examines the interplay of the teacher-supervisor personalities. Therefore we might describe this book as being a treatise on those aspects of human relations which are typical of the school staff organization. The purpose of this volume is to educate the reader to become an expert "guesser" of answers to supervisory problems. At the close of each chapter is a list of suggested reading. This list is not a bibliography but reading material which will supplement the text. It is presented in the order in which it might be read to maintain a sequence of thought similar to that found in the chapter. A bibliography of books on supervision and content related to supervision is placed at the close of this volume. No attempt was made to list the one-thousand odd articles relating to supervision in the periodical literature. A few of these are included in the suggested reading. Since this discussion limits itself to the "human relations" aspects of supervision, the author suggests that when it is employed as a textbook it be augmented by works on method and curriculum"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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