Tag Archives: professional identity

Reflective supervision for educators

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School leadership can come with joy, weight and loneliness, and the challenge of sustaining the self in the role long term. Adding to the alarming data from the longitudinal Australian Principal Occupational, Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, which shows the deteriorating mental health of school principals and high intention to quit their jobs, is the recent report by Professor Jane Wilkinson et al. (2025) on the invisible emotional labour and psychosocial risks of principal work.

At this week’s Australian Secondary Principals’ Association National Summit in Canberra, Federal Education Minister, The Hon Jason Clare MP, announced that the Commonwealth will contribute funding to a national pilot for reflective supervision for principals, coordinated by Headspace, in response to growing concern about the health and wellbeing of school leaders.

This week, I also completed my second two-day intensive for the Reflective Supervision in Education course at the University of Sydney, led by Professor Michael Anderson, Associate Professor Reverend Geoff Broughton and Associate Professor Mary Ann Hunter.

Recommendation 3 of the Unveiling the Ripple Effect: How Offensive Behaviours Impact School Leaders’ Productivity report (Dicke et al., 2025) is to institutionalise professional supervision and reflective practice for school leaders through a range of implementation actions. This, the authors argue, will create a systematic avenue for leaders to process complex experiences, strengthen coping mechanisms, and enhance professional growth.

Given these intersecting moments and the emergence of supervision for educators, this post explores what supervision might offer school leaders and the education system.

Reflective supervision is something Kristen Douglas and I talked about in a 2025 The Edu Salon podcast episode. In the episode Kristen explains that leaders need to “slow down to speed up”, with “down tools, balcony view, reflective practice” time to “talk, process and offset”. More recently, Associate Professor Paul Kidson and I spoke about reflective supervision on the podcast, with Paul pointing out that supervision is about principals’ work being sustainable so that “they can turn up in their work as humans to be able to serve their communities as best they can.”

As a school principal and coach whose PhD explored transformational professional learning, I have been intrigued by the concept of ‘supervision’ as I learn more about it and train to become a supervisor myself. What follows are my reflections at this moment in my journey.

Supervision is like and unlike it sounds. It is not ‘to supervise’ or oversee. Rather, it is about resourcing the self, and providing a space for someone to develop or experience “super vision” or a kind of super-seeing – a broader range of perspectives about their work leading to reflection, insight and ignition. In this way, it can be a useful process to support school leaders to make decisions amid complexity, hone their ethical and relational judgement, and mitigate the isolation they might find in their roles.

One metaphor for an aspect of what supervision offers is ‘pit time’, referencing the time coal miners were given for the restorative washing off of the grime of the day’s work, in order to enter their home and personal lives unmarred by the muck of the day. Supervision can offer a place for school leaders to find renewal and rejuvenation, remaining deeply engaged in the work of being with and for community, while being with and for themselves. It can help people to show up with intentionality and authenticity, at work and at home. However, if supervision is positioned only as a download space or wellbeing support, we risk underestimating its role in professional judgement, ethical decision making, and sustainable leadership practice.

Especially intriguing to me is the place of and for ‘soul’ in supervision. Michael Paterson (2019) says that “at the heart of reflective practice lies a dialogue between Soul, Role and Context” (p.15). He describes ‘soul’ as what makes a person tick, what gets them out of bed in the morning, and what fires them up from the inside with purpose and meaning. He challenges us to ask: “How do your soul and role fare at work? How do the requirements of your role sit with your deepest values? How does your context inhibit or release you for others? To what do you default at work: context, role or soul?” (p.16).

I am also particularly struck by Parker Palmer’s confronting statement that “as we become more obsessed with succeeding, or at least surviving … we lose touch with our souls and disappear into our roles” (p.15), at great cost to our sense of self, alignment, purpose and connection. I have been sitting with the discomfort of that question.

Do we lose touch with our soul as we disappear into our role? How might supervision connect soul, role and context?

Often in mentoring or coaching relationships, we explore, tease out and dig deep into our roles and our contexts, leading us to operationalise and positively act to perform in our roles and serve our contexts. Supervision occurs at the nexus of soul, role and context, attending to the inner world, core purpose, the crux of our heart and self in our work, and the interconnectedness of us as human beings in ecosystems of individuals, groups, structures and systems.

Supervision, I am discovering, is something that happens in relationship. It is a ‘walking together’ in reflective dialogue that opens, broadens, deepens, nudges and uplifts, moving us beyond the immediacy of events or the desire for a quick fix. In the walking together, supervisee and supervisor engage in a multiplicity of the whats and whos of professional practice. What is going on for someone externally and internally? Who is affected by the way they approach their work, and in what ways? What might they draw upon or do to better serve those in their communities?

Supervision invites a different pace to the day to day. A slowing down, an introspection, and a space of openness and safety. It can help us untangle complexity or notice what was previously peripheral, or unarticulated, or limited by habit. It can challenge us to look inwardly to places we might not normally allow ourselves to go or to awaken parts of ourselves we have pushed aside or dampened. It might ask us to put down the armour momentarily to consider our softness and vulnerabilities – something school leaders often train ourselves to harden in the name of resilience, performance and survival in the job. It can also invite us to look outwardly at those unseen others affected by the ways in which we engage in our work.

I am reminded of Christian van Nieuwerburgh’s work on a coaching way of being, and the importance of attending to the energy, words and needs of the person in front of you. I am reminded of Trista Hollweck’s work on professional accompaniment as a reciprocal learning journey involving walking alongside others with curiosity, empathy, nonjudgement and compassion. Supervision is a practice of accompaniment, attunement and presence that serves the supervisee and also those unseen others influenced by the way they show up. It works through intense listening, absolute presence, intentional questions, naming what might otherwise remain unspoken, and appropriate challenge, through a balance of intuitive and technical decisions by the supervisor, and the relational interplay between supervisee and supervisor.

In the current policy landscape, and at a time where much of the language of leadership is oriented towards direction, influence, and decision-making, supervision offers a way of approaching practice that values attention, curiosity, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty. In a profession characterised by pace and pressure, it offers a different kind of space in which leaders might come to know their work, and themselves, differently. In this moment of policy attention, how supervision is understood and enacted will shape its contribution to professional practice, resilience, and the sustainability of school leadership.

Post script: The day after this blog post was published, the 2025 Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Survey report was released (Dicke et al., 2026).

References

Dicke, T., Kidson, P., Marsh, H., (2026). The Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Survey (IPPE Report). Sydney: Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University.

Dicke, T., Rowston, K., Basarkod, G., Jardine, A., Clarke, T., Ko, H., & APPA, (2025). Unveiling the Ripple Effect: How Offensive Behaviours Impact School Leaders’ Productivity (APPA and IPPE Report). Sydney: Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University.

Paterson, M. (2019). Discipled by praxis: Soul and role in context. Practical Theology, 12(1), 7-19.

Palmer, P. J. (2004). A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. San Francisco, CA, Jossy-Bass.

Wilkinson, J., Walsh, L. Grice, C., Longmuir, F., Chandler, P., Keddie, A., & Delany, T. (2025). Invisible Labour: Principals’ Emotional Labour in Volatile Times. Report One: Technical Overview of the Project. Monash University.

My AARE 2018 slides

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Flip the System Australia AARE 2018 symposium

Flip the System Australia AARE 2018 symposium

Today I chaired a symposium at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) conference. The symposium was titled ‘Education research that engages with multiple voices: Flipping the Australian education system’. I presented alongside other authors from the just-published book Flip the System Australia: What Matters in Education: Dr Kevin Lowe, Dr Melitta Hogarth, Professor Bob Lingard, Associate Professor Greg Thompson, and Associate Professor Scott Eacott. You can get a sneak peek of our papers, which appear as chapters in the book, on Google Books.

Below I share the title, abstract, and slides from my presentation.

TITLE

Elevating the professional identities and voices of teachers and school leaders in educational research, practice, and policymaking

ABSTRACT

Flipping the system is not as simple as upending the current decision-making tower in education; it is about eking out, listening to, and elevating the voices of those on the ground in our schools.  Often the subjective voices and intricate identities of teachers and school leaders are absent, marginalised, or simplified in educational research, practice, and policymaking.

This paper analyses interview data from an empirical study of one Australian school in order to interrogate the nexus between teacher, school leadership, and school, from the perspective of those working in classrooms and schools.  It was crucial to include in this study those voices often at the nadir of the system: teachers and middle leaders who are frequently overlooked in school reform efforts.

The paper advocates for considering the identities, voices, and professional autonomy of teachers, and also considering the complex, unpredictable work of school leaders as they navigate fluid and multiple identities, and competing pressures.  It argues that the system has the potential to be an inclusive and collaborative crucible in which those working in schools are given platforms to speak, in which teacher and school leader experience and professionalism is trusted.

SLIDES

I used images of the kaleidoscope in my presentation, a metaphor for identity that I’ve explored in a previous blog post. The slides don’t tell the whole story of what I had to say, but they give a sense of it, and some people who attended have requested that I share them.

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Power of a nerd herd: Ode to my people

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Nerd Face Emoji

“It seemed Liv had spent the last eighteen years in search of her people, and in one sudden explosion of fate, they’d all been brought together in this place in time. Her eyes filled with tears as a sudden awareness filled her. They were all nerds.” ~ Danika Stone, All the Feels

The word ‘nerd’ is often given a bad name, being associated with relational ineptitude and being socially outcast. But for me nerdiness is about finding joy in knowledge: attaining it, interrogating it, producing it. Immersion in it. Consuming, curating and creating.

I love it when a nerd is positioned as a central figure of a story. One example is astronaut and botanist Mark Watney, the protagonist in Andy Weir’s 2011 novel The Martian. At one point Watney, stranded on Mars alone, yells, “Hell yeah! I’m a botanist! Fear my botany powers!” Watney embraces his nerdiness, calling himself a “space pirate” and invoking the metaphor of Iron Man when he catapults himself into space near the novel’s end. The story arc of the novel, and the Ridley Scott film in which Matt Damon plays Watney, is carried by this nerd-hero and his melding of science knowledge and affable humour. Watney is the epitome of the lovable nerd.

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on those people in my professional and personal spheres who make me feel like I’m at home when I’m with them. Many of these are fellow nerds. That is, we connect over our mutual love of something geeky (reading, writing, teaching, research, literature, coaching, art, science, story). We have a shared joy in finding things out and in doing purposeful work.

These are family and friends who, while I was completing my PhD, asked me about my research and listened to my responses. They are colleagues who get excited about a project we’re working on. Who co-plan courses, lessons, cross-curricular opportunities and assessments with a fervent enthusiasm and a twinkle in their eye. Who understand, or at least watch with knowing amusement, when I get excited about a new academic text or education book arriving on my desk (O, Book Depository, my faithful friend!), or about a paper being published. Who smile patiently when I cyclone into their office full of ideas busting to get out of my head or words tumbling out of my mouth. They are the past or present principal who continues to show an interest in and support of my work. Who sometimes says ‘yes’ and sometimes challenges me to think and do more.

They are the mentor or coach who waits while I work through my messy thoughts and helps me to arrive at cleaner ones. They are the colleague and bloggers who trust me enough to listen to their unformed thoughts or read their still-emerging ideas.
They are the professional friend who coaches me on Voxer or takes a phone call to help me work through a professional problem or issue. They are my PhD supervisors who gave me the space to explore some off-the-wall ideas, while challenging me to construct airtight rationales for non-traditional approaches. They are the well-known academic who shares their expertise via social media, flattening hierarchies and transgressing time zones. They are the conference-goer who stops me in the corridor after my presentation to talk for an hour, before moving our conversation to the long lunch it deserves. They are the co-author I’ve never met face to face, or spoken to on the phone, but with whom I’ve collaborated, co-written, and whose thinking and writing has pushed mine into new crevices.

They are my kind PLN who engage thoughtfully with me on Twitter, respond to my blog posts and meet up with me in cities around the world. Twitter is full of generosity. In my PhD acknowledgements, I thanked family and friends who had shown an interest and those in the social media world who had provided an antidote to isolation when I felt alone in my own head in the PhD wilderness.

Those people who feel like my tribe provide a space that is at once safe and challenging, celebratory and questioning, inspiring and industrious. It’s a place I can be excited about an idea, a text or a possibility. I can geek out and nerd it up without risking an eye roll or a snigger. I can share narrow interests and pursue broad passions.

In a world in which we are more connected than ever, we can be buoyed, empowered and supported by our connections, our people, our herd, our tribe, our squad. We can pay forward and give back. We can support each other’s nerdy excitement. In the karmic circle of knowing, learning, doing, being, leading and caring, we can share our knowledge, contribute our time to help others on their journeys, listen to others’ stories and celebrate others’ milestones.

Thank you to my fellow nerds who give me a sense of belonging and allow me the luxury of knowing that my personal brand of nerd has plenty of places to call home.

Achievement unlocked: I think I am Nerd Face Emoji.

Achievement unlocked: I think I am Nerd Face Emoji.