Supervision and Teachers’ Professional Development in Sub-Saharan African Countries: An exploratory literature review

Abstract

The role of supervision in in-service teacher education is widely recognized. This article presents the results of an exploratory literature review on supervision and professional development of teachers, conducted as part of a doctoral project involving Angolan Biology teachers and horizontal training and supervision processes. The review aimed to survey the studies in the area in sub-Saharan African countries and the corpus consist of 26 articles. The search was made in B-on and Google Scholar using terms such as teacher supervision and professional development, and followed the phases of a systematic literature review, which involves the search, selection, evaluation and categorization of information. Taking into account the results in regard to the countries in which the studies were developed, it seems that the area has been worked on in several countries, with most studies being conducted in Nigeria, Ghana or Kenya. As for the research foci, the results indicate the predominance of studies on relationships between representations of supervisory practices and several variables and the survey of perceptions about the concept and practices of pedagogical supervision. The studies explore quantitative or mixed methods, and the data collection techniques used are mainly questionnaire and, to a lesser extent, interviews. The studies characterizing supervisory practices are based on reports and not on observation, and there seems to be a need for qualitative studies. In the final considerations, the contributions of the study and clues for future work are identified.