Nature and Obligations of Supervisory Leadership

What are the moral nature and obligations of supervisory leadership?

The moral nature of leadership is that of relationships with teachers and relationships with students. The relationship with the teacher needs to be respectful and based on trust, where both the supervisor and teacher can feel open for honest interchange. The relationship with the student needs to be based on the moral activity of learning, and the development of a community conducive to learning.

The supervisor has the moral obligations to promote a moral community, ideals and virtues of teaching, and the character of learning and teaching. In promoting a moral community, the supervisor ensures that institutional procedures do not become more important than the people being served. In promoting the ideals and virtues of teaching, the supervisor commits to practice in an exemplary way, practice toward valued social ends, develop not only one's practice but to the practice itself, and a commitment to the ethic of caring. In the character of learning and teaching, the supervisor promotes the relationality of learning, a dialogue between learner and the reality under study.