Knowledge Work Supervision: transforming school systems into high performing learning organizations

Abstract

Asks the question: what if the focus of educational supervision was to shift from inspecting individual teacher‐behaviour to examining and improving three sets of key organizational variables ‐ work processes, social architecture and environmental relationships? What if supervision could be transformed from performance evaluation into a process for designing high performing schools? Presents the paradigm of Knowledge Work Supervision, an innovative model of educational supervision designed to achieve what is alluded to in the above questions. It is a systemic and systematic model for redesigning the anatomy (structures), physiology (flow of information and webs of relationships) and psychology (beliefs, values) of an entire school system. Explains that the paradigm is cyclical, having four phases each with several activities, and it was constructed by reviewing real‐world practices in several interrelated areas: socio‐technical systems design, knowledge work, quality improvement, business process re‐engineering and organization development. Claims that Knowledge Work Supervision marks the leading edge of an emerging paradigm shift in the field of educational supervision.

Citation

Duffy, F.M. (1997), "Knowledge Work Supervision: transforming school systems into high performing learning organizations", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 26-31. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513549710693099