Shedding Light on the Phenomenon of Supervision Traveling Incognito: A Field’s Struggles for Visibility

As a field of study, supervision has gone through a tumultuous history and continues to struggle for visibility. Its principles related to teaching and learning are often discussed, yet the term supervision has been controversial more than once. For a variety of reasons, historically and conceptually, supervision has traveled incognito under several guises. In this article, the history of supervision is explored as it relates to its ties with educational administration, curriculum, and more recently instructional leadership to explain its absence from the research literature, and to present implications for supervision as a field of study. An understanding of this incognito phenomenon and its struggles for visibility will help current and future scholars and practitioners to maintain the use of the term supervision, and to clarify the definition of supervision.