Lee S. Shulman

Signature pedagogies in the professions

Daedalus Summer 2005 The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries, in this case, their forms of professional preparation. When you do, you will generally detect the characteristic forms of teaching and learning that I have come to call signature pedagogies. These are types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions. In these signature pedagogies, the novices are instructed in critical aspects of the three fundamental dimensions of professional work –to think, to perform, and to act with integrity. But these three dimensions do not receive equal attention across the professions. Thus, in medicine many years are spent learning to perform like a physician; medical schools typically put less emphasis on learning how to act with professional integrity and caring. In contrast, most legal education involves learning to think like a lawyer; law schools show little concern for learning to perform like one. We all intuitively know what signature pedagogies are. These are the forms of instruction that leap to mind when we 1⁄2rst think about the preparation of members of particular professions–for example, in the law, the quasi-Socratic interactions so vividly portrayed in The Paper Chase. The 1⁄2rst year of law school is dominated by the case dialogue method of teaching, in which an authoritative and often authoritarian instructor engages individual students in a large class of many dozens in dialogue about an appellate court case of some complexity. In medicine, we immediately think of the phenomenon of bedside teaching, in which a senior physician or a resident leads a group of novices through the daily clinical rounds, engaging them in discussions about the diagnosis and management of patients’ diseases. I would argue that such pedagogical signatures can teach us a lot about the personalities, dispositions, and cultures Lee S. Shulman

How and What Teachers Learn: A Shifting Perspective.

We explore our efforts to create a conceptual framework to describe and analyse the challenges around preparing teachers to create, sustain, and educate in a ‘community of learners’. In particular, we offer a new frame for conceptualizing teacher learning and development within communities and contexts. This conception allows us to understand the variety of ways in which teachers respond in the process of learning to teach in the manner described by the ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’ (FCL) programme. The model illustrates the ongoing interaction among individual student and teacher learning, institutional or programme learning, and the characteristics of the policy environment critical to the success of theory‐intensive reform efforts such as FCL.

Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal

The problems of the education doctorates are chronic and crippling. The purposes of preparing scholars and practitioners are confused; as a result, neither is done well. We must move forward on two fronts simultaneously: rethinking and reclaiming the research doctorate (the Ph.D.), with its strong links to practice, and developing a robust and distinct practice doctorate (the P.P.D.) with a distinctive scholarly base. Unlike most current education Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s, the two degrees would serve distinct purposes, and like their medical analogs—the biomedical Ph.D. and the M.D.—would have different curricula and assessments. Building on lessons learned in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate and in the Carnegie Foundation’s studies of preparation for the professions, we argue that this reform is necessary and possible.

Medical Problem Solving A Ten-Year Retrospective

This essay reviews the origins, findings and influence of the monograph Medical Problem Solving: An Analysis of Clinical Reasoning. Majorfindings of the monograph are reviewed in the light of subsequent work and the results of selected studies of clinical cognition are related to the books conclusions, thus sketching the growth of this field of research in the decade since publication. Several remaining methodologicalproblems and scholarly issues in the field are discussed, including: sampling cases and subjects, the definition of medical expertise, the role of verbal report in analyzing thinking, the level of clinical realism needed in research, and the relation of informationprocessing approaches to more quantitative approaches such as behavioral decision theory and social judgment theory.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Social Studies

Abstract: Gudmundsdottir, S. & Shulman, L. 1987. Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Social Studies. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 31, 59‐70. The role of teachers pedagogical content knowledge in social studies is addressed through two case studies: a novice and a veteran teacher. We demonstrate that the important difference between the novice and the expert is manifested in a special kind of knowledge that is neither content nor pedagogy per se. It rests instead in pedagogical content knowledge, a form of teacher understanding that combines content, pedagogy and learner characteristics in a unique way.

Reconstruction of Educational Research

If there are some subjects on which the results obtained have finally received the unanimous assent of all who have attended to the proof, and others which .. .have never succeeded in establishing any considerable body of truths, so as to be beyond denial or doubt; it is by generalizing the methods successfully followed in the former enquiries, and adapting them to the latter, that we may hope to remove this blot on the face of science.

Fostering communities of teachers as learners: disciplinary perspectives

Education research in learning and teaching has alternated historically between periods in which subject matter disciplines were used as the organizing framework for investigation and implementation, and other periods in which the content areas nearly disappeared in favour of a quest for generic principles of instruction that could transcend disciplinary boundaries. There are few examinations of how these factors interact in the context of specific classroom‐ and pedagogy‐centred school reform. The papers that follow in this issue of JCS examine this issue through the lens of the pedagogic reform, ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’. This introduction outlines the key characteristics of this reform and describes the main issues in subsequent examinations of teachers learning to implement ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’ in science, social studies, English language arts, and mathematics.

The professions in America today: crucial but fragile

high point of human achievement, or, in George Bernard Shaw’s piquant phrase, as a “conspiracy against the laity,” there is little question that they have played a dominant role in industrial and postindustrial society since the early twentieth century. It is dif1⁄2cult to envision our era without the physicians, lawyers, and accountants to whom we turn for help at crucial times; or the architects and engineers who shape the environments in which we live; or the journalists and educators to whom we look for information, knowledge, and, on occasion, wisdom. Some forty years ago, in a Dædalus issue devoted entirely to the professions, guest editor Kenneth Lynn declared, “Everywhere in American life, the professions are triumphant.” He went on to comment, “Given this dramatic situation, it is truly extraordinary how little we know about the professions.” We appear to know much more about the professions now than we did forty years ago; certainly there is no paucity of scholarly and popular literature on speci1⁄2c professions, if less on the professions in the aggregate. But the professions themselves have not remained frozen over that time. Indeed, they have recently been subjected to a whole new set of pressures, from the growing reach of new technologies to the growing importance of making money. In recent years, the professions have not always had good press. Worried by evidence of incompetence and dishonesty, the general public seems to have lost its uncritical admiration for the pro-

Counting and Recounting: Assessment and the Quest for Accountability.

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Current research in the psychology of learning and teaching

The topic of this essay, current research in the psychology of learning and teaching, is itself a model of ill-founded presumption. It exemplifies in its choice of words nearly all the errors of both arrogance and ignorance that an instructor or a designer of instruction can perpetrate. Examine the components of this title to discover the grounds for our claim. We first refer to “current” research. But what does the term “current” imply? Does our audience share our conception of what is already past? Do our readers hold a common understanding of the history of this research domain that would render them equally interested in learning of its current state?