Critical approach to supervision: How should teacher supervision be?

Supervision is one of the problematic fields in education system today. The aim of this research is to determine the views of supervisors, administrators and teachers on the Ministry of National Education's principles and methods for teacher supervision and provide possible solutions fort he improvement of the system. Thus, it is tried to determine the participants' opinions on how often the teacher supervision topics in Teacher Supervision Guide should be supervised and who should supervise them. Aydın Efeler district's high school teachers and administrators in nine public high schools and supervisiors under the Directorate of Education constitute are the target population of research. Since the population were accessible, sample was not taken. The data were gathered from 217 teachers, 19 administrators and 32 supervisors. 52-item questionnaire was applied and the data were analyzed in SPSS 21.0 program. One sample chi-square test, two-way chi-square test and multiple responses analysis are used for the analysis. The major findings of the research can be summarized as follows: 1- A significant difference was determined between participants' responses for all items relating to the frequency of supervision (p<0,05). Participants' views on how often "paperwork" should be supervised is generally centered around the options of "once a term" and "once a year". Participants think that "planning the lecture" should be supervised "once a year". On the other hand participants think that the features in "teaching/learning environment matarials and technologies" and "individual charactersistics" dimensions should be supervised "more than twice a term". When the subjects are "valuing and guiding students", "special field program/content knowledge" and "teaching state", participants opinions generally centered aroun the option of "should not be supervised". 2- There is a significant difference between the views of participants on the frequency of teacher supervision and their duties as a supervisor and a supervisee in all items (p<0,05). Duty affects the views of participants regarding the frequency of teacher supervision. In general while supervisors prefer more frequent teacher supervision, supervisees prefer less frequent supervision or no supervision. 3- There is no significant difference between the views of participants on the frequency of teacher supervision and their genders. On the other hand, increase in participants' age and total service year cause increase in the views prefering more frequent teacher supervision. 4- It is determined that, participants perefer school principal, school vice principal, head of branch and city supervisiors primarly as the one that will supervise teacher. Ministry supervisior is not preffered in general. In "valuing and guiding student" dimension, student is suggested as the one who will supervise the teacher with a remarkable ratio and similarly in "teaching state" dimension, head of branch is suggested and with a remarkable ratio by participants. 5- The distribution of participants by their duty as a supervisior, administrator and teacher to the options of the ones who will supervise teacher is examined. It is found that supervisiors stick to regulations and suggest themselves and school principals as the ones eho will supervise teachers. School administrators generally suggest school principal, school vice principal and city supervisior as the ones who will supervise teachers, however teachers suggests variety of options in comparison with supervisiors and administrators. They prefer being supervised by school principal, school vice principal, head of branch in general. Besides they think that teachers may be supervised by students, colleques and teacher itself (self-supervision). Key words: Teacher supervision, supervisior, frequency of supervision, education inspector.