SCIENTIFIC

APPROACH TO
SUPERVISION
By:
Eko Prayitno
Stefanus Damai
M. Kafrawi
Budi Hartono

Supervisors themselves
were to discover the best
procedures for performing
teaching tasks and to help
teachers
acquire
these
methods in order to ensure
maximum pupil achievement

Teacher preparation and renewal were to be

undertaken only after identifying the
teacher's weaknesses by measuring the
teacher's knowledge of subject matter,
understanding of methods and teaching
processes, ability to see teaching in
academic and social perspectives,
endurance, and energy

Supervisors and teachers together were to

adopt an experimental attitude, trying out
new procedures and studying the effects of
each newly introduced means of
improvement until satisfactory results were
attained

Principles associated with democracy widespread participation, respect for

personality and the importance of eliciting
the contributions of many in reaching a
common goal - tempered the earlier
admonitions that teachers should act in
accordance with facts and principles that
were reasonably well established by the
process of science

Measuring teacher effectiveness, the goal of

scientific supervision, is a complicated task
and has not yet been solved despite many
efforts by those engage in scientific
research.

Behavioral scientists thought that the

problem of effective instruction could best
be met by applying psychological theories
of learning and the results of experiments
involving controlled manipulation of specific
factors

Although it has been more popular to focus

on teachers as they way to affect
instructional improvement, behavioral
scientists with a product development
orientation assumed that by improving
materials, they would improve educational
practice

Ease of scientific management - the

application of principles and techniques are
simple, which makes it an appealing
approach.

The rationale is that since the tests use low

level questions, there is no need to produce
high level thinking students. Such skills only
confuse students on these tests.

In the 1920s, supervisors stressed time-ontask and student attention from a

preoccupation for efficiency, effectiveness,
and productivity. In the 1940s, they
downplayed time-on-task as being too
mechanistic and authoritarian for
democratic classrooms

Mastery is usually measured by an

achievement test measuring low levels of
understanding, such as recall and
comprehension, rather than application and
evaluation

Orderly pupils may just as well produce an

effective teacher as an effective teacher
cause an orderly class

The Future of Scientific Supervision

It is not surprising then that a scientific

approach to supervision - that we can find
out why some people are more effective
teachers than others and that we can sue
this knowledge to help teachers become
effective - is a central dimension in the
supervision field