The power of effective schools lies not in their specific characteristics, but in their individual culture formation; a shared understanding of what ought to be symbolized by the behavior of all people involved in the school is part of that culture. The school cultural orientations of seven male and five female first-time principals (10 white and…

Findings of a study that used discourse analysis to explore the relationship of power and involvement to experience in supervisory conferences are presented in this paper. Based on Penman's (1980) content analysis scheme, conference talk between supervisors and teachers was analyzed according to manifest and latent levels of communication that…

Discourse analysis describes a level of spoken text that lies between grammar and nonlinguistic organization. Using such an approach to understand the practical problems of communication in supervisory conferences, this paper explores two dimensions of the conference: risk and politeness levels. Level of risk is determined by the degrees of…

A description of what occurs in the social context of the supervisory conference, based on the concept of conversational inference, a process by which participants assess each others' intentions and make appropriate responses, is presented in this paper. Using the illustration of a supervisor's request for teacher action that occurs in a…