Abstract
The gulf between educational leadership theory and contemporary curriculum scholarship is becoming increasingly problematic now that principals have been legally mandated to add curriculum monitoring to their duties as instructional leaders. Lacking familiarity with curriculum theory and practice, many overburdened administrators are turning to Management by Walking Around (MBWA) as a way of dealing with their ever burgeoning list of responsibilities. This article briefly reviews a particular MBWA model, the Three-Minute Classroom Walk-Through (Downey et al. 2004) and then interprets it through the lens of Henderson and Kesson’s (2004) arts of inquiry, a heuristic developed for helping curriculum workers think through the current multitude of reform proposals. This provides one example of the way that dialogue between the fields of curriculum studies and educational leadership may augment possibilities for lasting and positive reform of instructional supervision.
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Notes
Henderson and Gornick (2007) have revised the model in a way that positions the mode of phronesis or “practical judgment” as the overall process rather than one of the seven modes. This is consistent with our own understanding of phronesis as “the goal, guide, and source” (Brooks 2000) of hermeneutic inquiry and is the way we have approached our use of the model in this project.
References
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Brooks, N.J., Solloway, S.G. & Allen, L.A. Instructional Supervision and Curriculum Monitoring: Reinterpreting the Principal’s Role through the Arts of Inquiry. J Pers Eval Educ 20, 7–16 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-007-9031-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-007-9031-x