Models of Supervision: Choices

Supervision of teachers is an important part of both pre-service and in-service teacher education programs, and teacher educators have a wide choice of supervisory behaviors which they can use in the process of training second language teachers. It seems to be the case, however, that many second language teacher educators continually limit themselves to the same reasons for doing supervision and the same supervisory behaviors. This article illustrates how limiting some styles of supervision can be and then, in exploring alternative ways that supervision can be done, encourages teacher educators to experiment in their use of supervisory behaviors. Five models of supervision are discussed: 1) directive, 2) alternative, 3) collaborative, 4) non-directive, and 5) creative.