Leadership for socially-just supervision in K-12 schools in the context of the United States

ABSTRACT

This article addresses educational supervision as a platform for promoting the principles and foundations of social justice in K-12 schools in the United States. Fraser’s components of recognition, redistribution, and representation served as the foundation to examine socially-just supervision as a socio-culturally, politically, and economically grounded process. Socially-just supervision could promote reflective practices, support building relationships, create opportunities to improve teacher capacity, and focus effort and time to create momentum for teachers to become more socially-just as they interact with their students. Drawn from research, key practices as well as five guiding principles that support leadership for socially-just supervision for teachers in K-12 settings are provided. Without these principles, supervision, professional learning, and evaluation will remain discreet administrative functions that do not focus on the needs of teachers as they move throughout their careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational leadership
• Fraser’s model of justice
• social justice
• school leadership
• teacher supervision
• socially-just supervision

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Salih Çevik

Salih Çevik is a Ph.D. candidate and a graduate assistant in the Educational Administration and Policy program at the University of Georgia. He obtained his Master of Arts degree in Educational Leadership and Policy in University of Minnesota. For his studies, he received the Turkish Study Abroad Scholarship, CEHD Advanced Study Scholarship, and Ray E. Bruce Award

Sevda Yıldırım is a Ph.D. candidate in the Educational Administration and Policy Program at the University of Georgia. Her research interest areas are teacher evaluation and supervision practices and policies, and implementation of professional development. Prior to coming to University of Georgia, she earned a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership at the University of Florida.

Sally J. Zepeda Ph.D. is a Professor of Educational Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. She teaches courses in leadership, supervision, professional learning, and personnel evaluation. She has written widely about teacher and leader supervision and evaluation, school and district leadership, and succession planning. Her book, Instructional Supervision: Applying Tools and Concepts (4^th ed.), was also translated into Turkish.