Exploring school advisors' practices: Dwelling in/between the tectonic spaces is a story about three teachers assisting their student teachers in becoming teachers, and my safari through their landscapes; what i describe as dwelling in/between the tectonic spaces. Those spaces between school advising and student teaching, desire and fear, comfortable and uncomfortable, predictable and unpredictable, all speak to the fact that school advising is a complex phenomena. The exploration began with two research questions that guided the study: what is the school advisor's understanding of her practice? What is the school advisor's understanding of how one becomes a teacher? i worked with three school advisors from two large urban secondary schools during the 13 week secondary student teaching practicum in the 1994/95 school year. Diane and Jill came from Maskini Secondary School. They worked with one student teacher, Betty. Jessica came from Lord Cook Secondary School, and worked with two student teachers, Chety and Tiany. Several data generating procedures were integrated and a co-researching relationship fostered between the school advisors and me. The data generating procedures were conversations, participant observations, video and audio-taping. Student teacher assessment forms written by the school advisors were part of the data; and i kept a journal throughout the study. As i became immersed in the study, listened to several conferences between school advisors and student teachers, and held various conversations-on-actions with the school advisors, i realized i was dealing with a very complex phenomenon. Interpreting the data from the point of view of the two research questions that i began with, and trying to understand the school advisors' practices and their understanding of how one becomes a teacher from that view, would have meant camouflaging the dynamics and conflictual nature of such practices. Asking a what is question demanded that i objectify the school advisors. That would have meant sealing myself off from the atmosphere that i inhabited in those classrooms, the sounds of pedagogy that i heard, and the smiles that radiated the rooms. That would have meant not acknowledging what it was like for me inhabiting places full of love and hope. It would have also meant blocking off the painful moments that were evident at times. The moments and situations speak of what and how school advising was like and could be like. The data transformed the research questions. The complexity of school advising needed to be spoken of according to what it was like and could be like. Thus, what school advising was like and can be like or what the 1994/95 practicum was like for the school advisors is told in narratives and metaphors generated from the various conversations. The narratives, the situations, and the metaphors speak about what we have to grasp as a whole. They help us understand each advising of a student teacher by a school advisor on a certain day, in the tone of a previous incident, reminder, and suggestion. The narrative fragments and the synopsis make sense in the whole. Like parables they constitute what Paul Ricouer calls "networks of intersignifications." i have used geographical terms such as safari, tectonic, landscape, terrain, and paths, to communicate what the practicum was like for us as co-researchers. This study assists us in understanding what school advising could be like by offering accounts of what it was like for the co-researchers, Jill, Jessica, Diane, and myself. These accounts describe school advising and student teaching as processes of reorientation by disorientation which can be tectonic. For student teachers, the practicum is a reorientation to what was familiar when they were secondary students. For school advisors, the practicum is familiar because it is a yearly occurrence. However, this study found that student teaching and school advising can be very disorienting processes to the parties involved. The tectonicness highlight the need to nurture relationships in teacher education programs which include pedagogical relationships in the classrooms, triadic relationships during the practicum, student teacher-student teacher relationships, and, school advisor-student teacher relationships. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

This paper addresses the nature of Social Work supervision in the Directorate of Developmental Welfare Services. It contains five chapters namely Research Orientation, Literature Review, Social Structure in Namibia, Empirical Study and the last chapter is the Conclusions and Recommendations. The Research Orientation deals with motivating factors explaining the need for this research as well as pointing out the goal and objectives of the research. The goal of the research is to explore and describe Social Work supervision in the Directorate of Developmental Welfare Services in Namibia. The Literature Review gives comprehensive explanations of the importance of Social Work supervision in delivering social services. It provides opinions of different authors and their views on the nature of supervision, the supervisory needs of supervisees, and the functions and roles of supervisors. The Research Methodology chapter looks at how the research was done, how the researcher gathered information and the tools that were used. The research data was examined using the quantitative data analysis approach. Data analysis and interpretation breaks down the data obtained from the questionnaires, which are the instruments that the researcher used to obtain the information. The result consists of graphs and tables that clearly present the data. This chapter also covers the social structure of Namibia, a brief description of the regions in Namibia in order to help the reader understand the distances between offices. The Conclusions are a summary of the findings obtained from the respondents on the nature of supervision in the directorate. Possible solutions to improve supervision in the directorate are addressed in the recommendations. One of the recommendations is that the directorate should develop standardised supervisory guidelines. / Dissertation (MA (Social Work))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Social Work and Criminology / unrestricted

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2011. / This study was used to compare how supervisors and supervisees experience supervision at the University of Zululand in the department of psychology. A survey was conducted with the use of Likert type questionnaires. The researcher used the data that was gathered during the pilot study (which was conducted in 2008) as well as the recommendations to formulate a 5-point scale. Items were in a counterbalanced order to identify and control response bias. Participants were then asked to suggest what they thought should be done to improve supervision in an open-ended question. Each statement was presented individually in terms of percentages of respondents and their level of agreement with the statement. Statements were designed to elicit particular themes so the researcher condensed them so as to better describe self-perceived experiences of both supervisors and supervisees. The findings were descriptive of the reality of supervision (what is happening) as perceived by the participants. These findings were then compared with the existing literature on supervision (what should be happening). The findings showed a more positive picture than what had been anticipated by the researcher. Nevertheless, a few gaps were identified and recommendations were made in an attempt to bridge them. This study has provided valuable information on how supervision is experienced by both supervisors and supervisees. Moreover, it is of value to the university departments that incorporate supervision as part of their training process, especially the helping professions. Furthermore, the study helped in the identification of factors that supervisors and supervisees view as attributes in the promotion of professional development.

Charter and cyber charter schools were legislatively permitted to operate as publicly funded educational institutions in Pennsylvania with the passage of Act 22 of 1997. Examining the tuition payments from traditional school districts funding charter schools and resulting economic, operational, and programmatic impacts on traditional K-12 education was the purpose of this study. Conflict theory provided the theoretical framework which proposes that inequity and competition for limited resources is the result of powerful groups exerting their influence on the greater society. This study's research questions focused on determining the impact tuition payments to charter schools had on public K-12 student achievement, economic, and operational decisions. This study utilized a mixed method data collection design on the perceptions and experiences of K-12 school district superintendents and secondary building principals in 45 school districts within a 3-county region in Pennsylvania. The qualitative interviews were analyzed for credibility, transferability, dependability, and objectivity. The quantitative surveys were analyzed for mean, median, mode, range, variance, and standard deviation. The findings of this research study affirmed conflict theory and resulting economic, operational, and programmatic impacts on public K-12 education. Positive social change implications of this study include recommendations that Pennsylvania's legislature undertake an evaluation and reassessment into the long-term funding equity and sustainability of charter schools and public K-12 education.

Few studies have been conducted to take an in-depth look at the role and experience of a new middle school assistant principal. Advantageous timing provided the opportunity for the author to conduct this research study examining his experience as a first-year assistant principal. The guiding question for this autoethnography was "What can be learned from the experiences of a first-year assistant principal that can be used to improve the administrative certification program and training of future assistant principals"? Autoethnography is employed as a methodology to portray the experience and understanding of the participant/observer in comparison to his training and preparation to become the assistant principal of a middle-level school. Data were gathered from personal journal entries both verbally recorded and written by the author during this year and a half period. Other data sources included school discipline records, behavior files, and incident reports recorded during the experience as well as those leading up to this experience. This study describes the preparation experienced by the author from his time as a middle school and high school classroom teacher, through the certification process, and into his acceptance of his first administrative position at a semi rural, medium size, sixth- and seventh-grade intermediate school. This study takes a critical look at the author's perceived understanding of students, discipline, and his preparation to become an educational leader. The author's own experience forced him to question his views and readiness while bringing to light needed reforms and understandings to the world of an assistant principal.

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