Building trust and impacting teachers’ professional growth: A conceptual framework of formative supervision

Despite their distinct purposes, formative supervision and summative evaluation are frequently conflated in teacher evaluation systems, limiting opportunities for meaningful teacher growth and trusting supervisor–teacher relationships. This article proposes a conceptual framework to guide administrators’ approaches to providing teachers with feedback as part of a cyclical formative supervision process consisting of frequent informal observations followed by timely reflective conversations. Guided by instructional supervision and trust theories and concepts developed by education scholars and practitioners, the article asserts that trust will be developed through reflective conversations if supervisors use collaborative and nondirective feedback strategies with an emphasis on teachers’ perspectives and strengths. Trusting supervisor–teacher relationships support teachers in their willingness to take risks and seek supervisors’ feedback and guidance. The article also recommends a specific formative supervision approach that is aligned to, and puts into practice, the formative supervision concepts and theories depicted through the conceptual framework.