“I Wanted to Give Back to the Profession:” Preservice Teacher Supervision as Service Work

ABSTRACT

For decades, university supervisors of preservice teachers (PSTs) have been undervalued and ignored. Following neoliberal reforms, post-secondary institutions have outsourced PST supervision to contingent faculty, failed to provide professional development for supervisors, offered poor employment conditions, and overlooked PST supervision in tenure and promotion decisions. These actions, combined with the service orientation of teacher education, have framed PST supervision as service work. This case study sought to understand how supervisors and administrators in one teacher education department positioned supervisors’ work as service and the influence of the institution and department on that positioning. Using a survey, interviews, and document analysis, this study found that supervisors positioned their work as professional, financial, and emotional service. In turn, the institution and teacher education department positioned supervisors’ work as service by providing minimal compensation and no institutional rewards and expecting supervisors to enact roles that were not officially required of them. The study’s implications are that teacher educators and higher education administrators should strive to recruit and retain a professional corps of supervisors, provide ongoing professional development to supervisors to assist in the professionalization of the role, and resist notions of supervision as service.

KEYWORDS:

• University supervision
• preservice teacher supervision
• service
• neoliberalism
• teacher educator

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this paper, I use AACTE’s (2018) definition of a PST supervisor: “An individual involved in teacher preparation whose primary institutional home is a college or university…who engage[s] in evaluation, coaching, instruction, and partnership and assume[s] expanded and multiple responsibilities within, and often across, each of these four domains” (p. 12).

2. In this paper, I use Burns et al.’s (2016a) definition of PST supervision: “the enactment of multiple tasks and practices aimed at supporting [preservice teachers’] learning in clinical contexts” (p. 420).

3. All people and place names are pseudonyms.

4. Participants were presented a $25 gift card for taking the survey, which likely increased the response rate (Nulty, 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Capello

Sarah Capello is an assistant professor at Radford University where she teaches in the graduate programs in educational leadership. Her teaching and research interests include pre-service teacher supervision, practitioner research, and doctoral assessment.