(44) N. Ricciardi, Departmental Teaching in the Grammar School, Education, Feb. 1918, Vol. 38, pages 450-453.

(45) J. H. Rodgers, Junior High School Curricula and Programs, School Review, Mar. 1921, Vol. 29, pages 198-205.

(46) W. A. Smith, Junior High School Practices in Sixty-four Cities, Educational Administration and Supervision, March, 1920, Vol. 6, pages 139-149.

(47) D. Snedden, Sociological Determination of Objectives in Education, Chapter II, The Junior High School, J. B. Lippincott Co.

(48) D. Snedden, The Character and Extent of Desirable Flexibility as to Courses of Instruction and Training, Educational Administration and Supervision, Vol. 2, pages 219-234.

(49) D. Snedden, Peculiar Psychological Conditions and Social Needs of the Seventh and Eighth Grades, Proceedings of National Educational Association, 1916, pages 398-403.

(50) Snedden, Problems of Secondary Education, Chapter on the Intermediate High School, pages 318-330, Houghton Mifflin Company, N. Y., 1917.

(51) P. C. Stetson, A Statistical Study of the Junior High School from the Point of View of Enrollment, School Review, April, 1918, Vol. 26, pages 233-245.

(52) May Trumper, Handicaps to the Junior High School, InterMountain Educator, Mar. 1923, Vol. 18, pages 236-238.

(53) J. K. Van Denburg, The Junior High School Idea, Henry Holt & Co., N. Y., 1922.

(54) G. M. Whipple, Psychology and Hygiene of Adolescence, A Chapter on Principles of Secondary Education, edited by Paul Monroe, Macmillan Co., N. Y., 1915.

(55) H. B. Wilson, The Junior High School System of Berkeley, California, Bulletin No. 4, 1923, U. S. Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C.

The Principal as Supervisor

FRANK P. WHITNEY, EAST CLEVELAND, OHIO.

¤÷HE principal is the key to the situation. Around him centers the whole educational system. He

T holds the strategic position. His job is infi

nitely varied. Far enough removed to get a fairly good perspective, he is yet close enough to the actual teaching process to enter into it sympathetically. Upon him all manner of duties devolve, duties of organization, administration and supervision, not to mention those of a social nature. One may hold the view that while organization and administration may, from the nature of the case, have prior claim on the attention of the principal, they are not, therefore, necessarily primary in their importance. However, without attempting to evaluate these respective claims, certainly without any desire to depreciate the importance of organization and administration, let us consider some of the desirable outcomes of supervision.

Supervision is here defined as the definite effort to immediately and directly improve teaching. All organization and administration, all custodial service, all Board meetings, all extension classes, all planning and erection of buildings, are designed more or less remotely to produce effective teaching. All these things are in a sense preliminary and subordinate to supervision. Supervision is carried on only by those who, in direct contact with pupils and teachers, know what is going on in the classroom, are able to measure the efficiency of instruction and to suggest ways and means of improvement. The principal, by virtue of his first-hand knowledge and his unequalled opportunity, should be the supervisor par excellence of the school system. He should be responsible for the

co-ordination within his building of all outside supervision. To do this effectively, he must himself know intimately every line of work carried on in his school. He must know his teachers, their habits of work, their attitudes, their likes and dislikes, not that he may impose upon them other habits or attitudes, even if such were possible, but that he may intelligently assist them to do the thing that they desire to do.

First of all I would mention as a desirable outcome of the principal's supervision the encouragement of initiative on the part of the teacher. Supervision is today on trial largely because it has too often meant the imposition of a dead uniformity. Flexibility and variety are possible only when teachers have freedom to develop and to follow their own purposes. Purposeful activity on the part of the teacher is quite as fundamental a necessity as purposeful activity on the part of the pupil. The principal's supervision then will furnish a constant stimulus and challenge to the teacher to use original solutions. We are still dreadfully afraid of the unusual response to a given situation. It is not enough to say to a teacher, even were it true, "You are now free, do as you please." As a matter of fact, no teacher is or can be wholly free to do as he pleases. Within the limits set by the city and the state organization and the general objectives of the school there should be, however, room for exercise of all a teacher's originality and creative effort. Teaching has been bound so tightly by tradition in its procedure that supervisors must actively assist in establishing freer modes of reaction. Teaching is stupefying and deadening in the degree to which it is reduced to mere routine and slavish submission. By rights, teaching should be of all occupations most liberalizing and enlarging. That it should generally have been otherwise is in part chargeable to the vast stupidity of most of what has passed under the name of supervision.

As a second outcome, I mention adaptation of instruction✓ to individual needs. No one can do this as well as the building

X

principal. The average teacher has neither the courage nor the intelligence to foster individual differences. Routine, uniformity and unintelligence go together. We are just beginning to perceive the enormous significance of human variations. Not all variation is significant, but everything significant for progress is found in variation. The danger of developing extreme individualists may be great in society as now organized, but there is no evidence at hand to prove that the discovery and development of differing abilities and aptitudes in school tends to increase that danger. In fact it is altogether likely that we shall discover that the fostering of natural distinctions and differences in the school, where they may be given direction toward service and social ends, is the most effective means toward combating that extreme individualism in the industrial and social order of the outside world from which democracy has suffered and is still suffering so grievously.

In the third place, I would put as a desirable outcome of supervision, the reorganization of subject matter. The principal must take a hand in this. Such reorganization as is here contemplated is a continuing process designed to make subject matter fit the various and varying needs of children. Subject matter, when thought of in relation to the psychological needs of children, cannot be selected once for all. Selection, elimination, adaptation, should always be going on. With great ranges of capacity, ability and aptitude in our children still unexplored, we permit the school and the teacher to putter along with a narrow, medieval curriculum, unconscious of the possibilities lurking in modern subject matter handled in a modern fashion. One of the aims of supervision is to persuade teachers gradually to "abandon the notion of subject matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself," and to make habitual the type of instruction that involves a continuous reconstruction "moving from the child's present experience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies."

A fourth outcome concerns the improvement of teaching M method. If one approaches the problem of method from the point of view of behavior and how to change it, the identity of subject matter and method is soon apparent. "Behavior is as broad as life itself, and refers especially to our ways of reacting, internally or externally, to the various situations of life." Fundamentally method and subject matter cannot be divorced. Improving one in any thoroughgoing way will as certainly improve the other. We cannot, for example, adopt a practical working philosophy of interest or effort or discipline in the sphere of method that will not affect equally the selection of subject matter. No more can we adopt such a philosophy for subject matter without profoundly modifying our methods. We cannot put through a project on method alone. Any project worthy of the name involves selection of subject matter. The moment we succeed in organizing our material in large instruction units we find corresponding alterations taking place in our methods. Experience demonstrates, however, that without assuming separation of matter and method, it is worth while emphasizing the need of improving, pari passu, both aspects of instruction.

Closely connected with every phase of the teaching process, conditioning its success at every turn, is what we may call technique, the mastery of details. As the fifth outcome, I would mention the development and improvement of teaching technique. A teacher might conceivably be full of initiative, purposeful, resourceful, able to direct both subject matter and method so as to meet the needs of individuals, and yet fail as a teacher merely through lack of the special skills required in handling classes of forty children. How to deal with cases of tardiness, obstinacy, ill will, or illness; how to have pencils, books, paper and maps ready when needed; how and when to test, to grade, to praise, to exhort, to encourage and to censure; how to plan and outline and keep records; these, and a multitude of other matters, must somehow be done with ease,