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The Supervisor's Educational Platform Throughout Sergiovanni and Starrat's book they have been emphasizing the link between supervision and the involvement of teachers in the core work of restructuring the act of supervision. They want to see supervision which encourages teachers to "draw on the collective wisdom of their craft and to collaborate on the redesign of student learning" (p.158). Beside the technical understandings associated with teaching, Sergiovanni and Starrat urge teachers to examine their beliefs, opinions, values and attitudes which provide a foundation for practice. They want teachers to know what these core beliefs are (they call them "platforms") and understand the relationship between platform and practice. Thus we begin with asking the question... What is schooling? A new survey on education released on September 7, 1999 shows that Americans think education is so important they are willing to pay substantially higher taxes for specific improvements. Although parents generally are enthusiastic about their children's schools, they believe other schools in their community aren't as good and schools across the nation are even worse. There is strong support across the board for many improvements - from enforcing academic standards to paying teachers more and fixing up rundown schools. Here is the result of NPR/KAISER/KENNEDY SCHOOL EDUCATION SURVEY This was a random telephone survey of 1,422 adults nationwide. Results are presented in percentages. These are the answers to all the questions that were asked in the survey. Question numbers are not always in order because right before the survey was taken, some questions were added or deleted. Sergiovanni and Starrat (1998) note that we will better understand supervision if we understand that there is a "moral" dimension involved in teaching and supervision. They note that there are four dimensions of "morality" or "professionalism" surrounding a teacher and a supervisor. They are:
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