Teachers can significantly improve if their preparation programs invest marginally more effort into preparing field supervisors. Field supervision is ubiquitous throughout teacher preparation and—alongside guidance from mentor teachers—can aid preservice-teacher development. Specifically, supervisors provide external feedback and evaluation to facilitate instructional improvement, improving teacher quality and other important teacher and student outcomes.
In spite of the critical role that they can play in teacher preparation, field supervisors are often overlooked and ignored. Supervisors are generally not connected to the program and are given little concrete guidance on how to conduct their responsibilities or best fulfill their roles. What if small changes in how field supervisors observe and provide feedback to preservice teachers could improve their development as novice teachers?
Field supervisors periodically observe preservice teachers, often providing some type of feedback on their teaching practice. They detail what they saw throughout the classroom, praise the teacher for effective actions, and offer recommendations for improvement.
Feedback has been historically and consistently recognized as a fundamental element for learning, but it is rarely examined for preservice teachers until recently. Earlier this year, I was the co-author of a new study that did just that.
Our study of over 3,000 preservice-teacher evaluations finds that supervisors overwhelmingly offer feedback in two areas: classroom management and lesson planning. That is because preservice teachers need the most help during clinical teaching in those two distinct areas. Logically, we found that the more a supervisor provides written critiques, the worse the preservice teacher likely did in their evaluation scores. Moreover, we observed that detailed feedback from supervisors in these areas is associated with preservice-teacher improvement. This suggests that feedback on specific areas of classroom management and lesson planning could help to more dramatically improve instruction.
More importantly, we note how the nature of this feedback changes throughout student teaching. Supervisors who initially focus on classroom management and then on lesson planning later seem to help struggling preservice teachers catch up to their top-performing peers. The general statement of “you can’t teach an unruly class” appears to be the underlying rationale.
Specifically, we identified a compelling need for teacher preparation to focus early on the management skills of maintaining student attention and nonverbal techniques before emphasizing more instructional skills, such as improving the areas of lesson delivery, lesson cycle, and verbal corrections.
What does this mean for preservice-teacher improvement?
- Start with classroom management: Programs need to ensure that field supervisors maintain an early focus on and proficiency of classroom management. Novice teachers need to know and execute an array of strategies on how to manage large groups of students, maintain their attention, and subtly manage student behavior.
- Build engagement. Later observations should focus on lesson planning and instructional techniques. This includes building preservice teachers’ capacity for purposeful lesson delivery, redirections to ensure student engagement, and practiced checks for student comprehension.
- Avoid cognitive overload. Programs should encourage field supervisors to be specific with their feedback and cautious about telling preservice teachers to try to improve or fix too many things at once.
Preparation programs need to work with their field supervisors, teacher educators, and mentor teachers to ensure that these principles permeate clinical teaching. This will prioritize preserviceteacher instructional learning and development rather than assume clinical experience is sufficient training as is.
Teachers often consider how their K-12 students build upon their knowledge, scaffolding content piece by piece. Teacher-preparation programs need to do the same within and between every component of field training and think about foundational skills that preservice teachers need to incrementally build on to be successful in the classroom. Then, this minute shift could improve preservice-teacher learning and ultimately have cascading improvements on K-12 student learning.
