supervision were examined. Leaders whose writings were studied are: Arvil S. Barr, William H. Burton, and Leo J. Brueckner (whose definition of supervision is considered traditional); Alice Miel (who initiated the idea of supervision as democratic, cooperative leadership); Morris Cogan (who rationalized clinical supervision); and Thomas J. Sergiovonni (whose theory building and integration of supervisory models has generated recent interest). Each of these theorists, according to Bolin (1983) has widely influenced notions of effective instructional supervision.
Several conclusions were formulated on the basis of the review. These were:
(1) There may have been a better objective-subjective balance in the characterizations of instructional supervision provided in early theories of the practice than there is in more current theories.
(2) Instructional supervision best meets its objectives when principals evaluate rather than supervise. In other words, principals should not monitor and direct teacher instruction but rather only assess it.
(3) It is not so much the principal's actual power but his symbolic power that influences teachers to improve instruction. Most early theoreticians asserted that it was not so much what principals did to influence change in instruction that produced it; rather, change was more likely to occur as a function of what teachers believed to be the knowledge base, credentials and social influence of the principal.
(4) None of the early theories fully accounted for the experiential nature of instructional supervision, the dynamics of the supervisory helping relationship, and the critical, evaluative nature of the teacher-supervisor relationship.
Regarding more current notions of effective instructional supervision, several different theoretical models have been developed. First, there is the traditional model of instructional supervision perhaps best characterized in the writings of...