From watching from above to consulting supervision

Supervision, the essay says, once sounded like an excellent person watching from above, but the idea has changed toward democratic leadership, advice, cooperative in-school supervision, and a teacher’s professional growth. Jeong Tae-beom in 2002 places it as professional guidance and advice so that teaching and learning can be made more efficient, and so that the curriculum and the school can be run more rationally.

Consulting supervision, following Jin Dong-seop and Kim Do-gi in 2005, begins with a teacher’s voluntary request and keeps a horizontal relationship. It mainly takes on a teacher’s professional development, not school management as a whole, and anyone with the skill to solve the problem asked about can serve, not only a principal or a supervisor. Its two core features are voluntariness and professional skill.

Types, field troubles, and Yangdong and Ilwol in 2019

Fields include teaching and the curriculum, life guidance and class management, and teacher-capacity development. It may be customized, when a consultant visits a school with a weak evaluation or an education issue, or visiting, when it supports a teacher’s own request for lesson improvement. In the field, procedures are often too complicated, some consultants lack skill, and participation has even been set as a bonus or an evaluation scale, which has heated competition among schools.

In the 2019 school year, Yangdong and Oksan teachers met at Oksan, with lecturer Choi Myeong-hye, to practice empathy conversation cards for a character-centered curriculum. On 28 May 2019 Ilwol held a lesson-sharing concert at its Cheonggi branch, on combined-grade classes and reconstruction of the 2015 revised curriculum, and planned to continue autonomous supervision. This page stays with those 2002 and 2005 definitions and with the 2019 cases, and does not add later official supervision tallies. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Supervision is etymologically a joining of super and vision, and has the meaning “an excellent person looks down from above and watches.” In origin it can sound like watching or overseeing educational activity. But the concept has changed a great deal: an authoritarian sense has given way, democratic leadership is emphasized, guidance and advice are valued, and through school education cooperative in-school supervision and self-supervision are emphasized, so that skill in teaching and ability in management have come to matter. Recent definitions differ with the emphasis of scholars at home and abroad, but a common point, following Jeong Tae-beom, 2002, is that supervision is a set of professional and technical activities — guidance and advice, the offering of information, volunteer work — provided so that teaching and learning can be made more efficient, a teacher’s professional growth supported, and the running of the curriculum and of school management made more rational. A teacher’s professional growth is treated as essential, because the teacher has the most important role in educational work, and continuing effort to grow professionally is the most important element in realizing what education is for; supervision is the most meaningful attempt toward that growth. The essay then explains the features and kinds of consulting supervision and introduces concrete cases. Recent supervision has been concentrating on the autonomy of the individual school and on teachers’ requests, and voluntary participation is highly valued. Autonomous supervision has that character, and school consulting is quite similar, yet autonomous supervision is still, at base, carried out through an authoritative hierarchy between the supervisor and the teacher, which is an essential difference from school consulting. What is needed is supervision through a horizontal relationship that guarantees a teacher’s voluntariness as far as possible: that is consulting supervision. On that basis it can be defined as advice offered by people inside or outside the school who have professional skill, in order to develop professional skill related to teaching and learning, on the basis of a teacher’s voluntary request. Following Jin Dong-seop and Kim Do-gi (2005), professionally prepared supervisors, according to a teacher’s request, diagnose a problem and a capacity required in performing their duties, prepare alternatives for solving it and for development, and support or advise the process of putting the alternatives into practice. Because it uses consulting, it shares much with school consulting, but school consulting takes charge of school management as a whole, while consulting supervision mainly takes charge only of the teacher’s professional development. Supervisors exist inside, so problems that arise from time to time can be solved close at hand. Autonomous supervision shares a view of the teacher as an autonomous being, unlike supervision from an education-administration office, but “autonomy” there can in practice mean only the principal’s autonomy. The subject of autonomous supervision is the principal, the vice-principal, and the supervisor; the subject of consulting supervision is the client, that is, a member of the school. In consulting supervision the client and the school consultant form a horizontal relationship; in autonomous supervision the relationship may be horizontal or vertical. The greatest distinguishing features are voluntariness and professional skill. Most consulting supervision is also similar to peer supervision in that the supervisors are almost teachers, but unlike peer supervision it begins when a client subjectively requests consulting. Earlier supervision often used “guidance” and “advice” without distinguishing them, or used a method of “guidance” similar to an instruction, which was a main reason for a somewhat negative reception. Consulting supervision was attempted, by applying the theory of school consulting, in order to make supervision as advice, keeping a horizontal relationship and protecting a teacher’s voluntariness. A second feature is professional skill. Earlier supervision often proceeded without the supervisor’s skill being in place, so that the person being supervised could hardly get the help they asked for; consulting supervision can guarantee skill because a consultant with skill, including a fellow teacher, carries it out. Success or failure may almost be said to lie in the supervisor’s skill, and there is no rule that a consulting supervisor must be a supervisor-officer, a principal, or a vice-principal: anyone who can solve the problem a teacher asks help with, regardless of rank or the character of the post, can be one. Fields include teaching and learning and the curriculum, life guidance and the management of the school and the class, and the development of a teacher’s capacity and other education policy. It is also divided into customized consulting supervision, in which a consultant goes to a school whose school-evaluation results have been insufficient or where an education issue has arisen, and visiting consulting supervision, which supports a teacher’s voluntary request about lesson improvement. The aim is to leave supervision centered on guidance or oversight, and to strengthen educational capacity by supporting creative, autonomous work centered on the person who asks. In the school field it is a frequent reality that the work is done in a way that does not match that purpose. One reason is that the procedure is considerably more complicated than earlier supervision, so accessibility is lower. Another, though it is only some, is that consulting supervisors are short of professional skill. In education a field teacher is the greatest expert, and a principal or vice-principal is often somewhat less sharp as a lesson consultant than a teacher, yet most lesson consultants for teachers are still principals, vice-principals, or supervisors — a point that should be thought about again. Unlike school consulting, lesson consulting is often carried out in regular subject hours, so it is hard for a sitting teacher to take part as a consultant, and the procedure needs various days, which makes the work hard in a busy school. For lesson consulting to go well, the more persuasive claim is that efficiency rises when, as in original peer supervision, a same-grade or in-school teacher takes part as consultant, rather than an outside expert. That consulting supervision now going on in schools is often run in a changed form that leaves its purpose and principles is a point no one can deny. When voluntary participation became hard, the degree of participation was even set as a performance bonus or as a scale of school evaluation, which has created overheating among schools. If consulting supervision is truly to show its light, the core principles of voluntariness and professional skill must be properly kept. There is a large gap between theory and the field, which can be seen as because education policy has been pushed too hastily. The ministry, rather than spreading a new policy to everyone in a short time, should proceed more carefully after fully receiving the views of field teachers and after several years of a pilot or research operation. For it to settle properly, what present education truly needs should be grasped more clearly, and genuine field consulting should be sought according to the class, the school’s character, or the situation. Yangdong Elementary School (principal Seok Jun-seong), on the 8th as the account places that day, carried out 2019-school-year consulting supervision at Oksan Elementary, for teachers of Yangdong and of Oksan. To strengthen teachers’ capacity to run a character-centered curriculum, lecturer Choi Myeong-hye, author of the empathy conversation cards, was invited on the theme “understanding empathy conversation cards for running a character-education-centered curriculum”; what was new was that it was planned and carried out jointly with Oksan. Through it, teachers came to understand the meaning of empathy and the necessity of empathy conversation, practiced the cards themselves, and came to know methods of student counseling, parent counseling, an empathy lesson, and the teaching of writing that use the cards. Ilwol Elementary School, on 28 May 2019 from 13:00 to 17:00, carried out a consulting-supervision “lesson-sharing concert” at its Cheonggi branch. It invited teacher Kang Seok-hyeon of Wolgok Elementary and principal Kwon Yeong-hui of Andong Yeongho Elementary, in order to create a school culture of growing together centered on combined-grade classes, and for the stable settlement of student-participation lessons and process-centered assessment through reconstruction of the curriculum. Online feedback on teaching-learning plans (a search for solutions), open lessons, and discussion of teaching methods according to the character of the subject were carried out, in the order of Kwon Hyeon-gu’s open lesson and lesson sharing, then reconstruction of the 2015 revised curriculum. Through this, the settlement of student-participation combined-grade classes, and the sharing of concrete methods of curriculum reconstruction as education professionals, took place. Ilwol planned to continue autonomous supervision in order to establish an active culture of lesson sharing among teachers, to raise the school’s educational capacity, to strengthen capacity for student-participation lessons, and to solve lesson-related tasks. An education office should prepare a support system from a broad view: discover various school consultants, or train excellent people with a consultant qualification, and prepare a personnel pool; know accurately the consulting demand of clients in schools and offices under it; and play the role of a school-consulting manager who connects clients and consultants. A teacher themselves might also set as a goal growing professionally through lively supervision and becoming an excellent consultant who can guide and advise other teachers. It should not be ended as a one-off training or consulting; with a sense of educational mission, further effort for one’s own professional development should be made voluntarily. This page stays with the 2002 and 2005 definitions and with the 2019 school-year cases as the essay places them, and does not add later official supervision tallies.

Last updated: 14 November 2026