Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers

Our hope is that this blog will become a forum in which people can exchange ideas on how to recruit, develop and retain exceptional Jewish educators through mentoring and e-mentoring students, teaching candidates, and teachers in our day and supplemental schools. The present focus of this blog is to empower Jewish teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, consultants, and staff developers to integrate web technology (i.e. web tools and apps) into their teaching and teacher training.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Clinical Supervision

What is Clinical Supervision?

Clinical supervision is the generic term that describes the process by which a supervisor or mentor helps develop the in-service or pre-service teacher.

Models for Clinical Supervision

There are several different models for clinical supervision. For example, the clinical supervision model of *M. Cogan (1973), contains the following eight steps:

1. Establish a helping and trusting relationship.

2. Plan lessons and units with the teacher.

3. Plan for the observation.

4. Observe instruction.

5. Analyze the data to find significant patterns in the delivery of instruction.

6. Plan for the clinical conference.

7. Conference to review the classroom event.

8. Plan for the next steps (e.g. teacher and supervisor assignments, next observation, etc.).

*Cogan, M. L (1973). Clinical Supervision. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

The clinical supervision model of *Glickman, Gordon, and Ross-Gordon (2001) consists of these five steps:

1. Pre-conference with the teacher.

2. Observation of the classroom.

3. Analyzing and interpreting the observation, and determining the approach toward conferencing.

4. Post-conference with the teacher.

5. Critique of the previous four steps.

In all these clinical supervision models, the essential component is the three-step conference cycle, and that will be the subject our the next post.

*Glickman, C. D., Gordon, S. P., & Ross-Gordon, J. M. (2001) (5^th ed.) SuperVision and Instructional Leadership: A Developmental Approach. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.