A Conversation with Lee Shulman—Signature Pedagogies for Teacher Education: Defining Our Practices and Rethinking Our Preparation

Abstract

Lee S. Shulman is the President of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a foundation whose mission is “to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the profession of teaching.” Prior to assuming his role at Carnegie, Shulman was the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University and Professor of Educational Psychology and Medical Education at Michigan State University, where he was also the founding Co-Director of the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT). He is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and a former president of the National Academy of Education. He is also the recipient of AERA’s career award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research and the E.L. Thorndike Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education from the American Psychological Association’s Division of Educational Psychology. He is a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lee Shulman’s research and writings have dealt with the study of teaching and teacher education; the growth of knowledge among those learning to teach; the concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK); the assessment of teaching; medical education; the psychology of instruction in science, mathematics, and medicine; the logic of educational research; and the quality of teaching in higher education. In his work at the Carnegie Foundation, he has emphasized the importance of “teaching as community property” and the central role of a “scholarship of teaching” in supporting needed changes in the cultures of higher education.

One of the Carnegie Foundation’s current projects is “The Quest Project For Signature Pedagogies In Teacher Education.” Supported with funds from The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund as well as Carnegie’s own resources, it is an initiative to explore and design “signature pedagogies” for the education of teachers. It works with teachers and teacher education faculty to identify effective practices and produce detailed, layered representations of these through video, teaching materials, student work, and reflective commentary by both teacher educators, teacher learners, and their students. Beverly Falk, The New Educator‘s Editor, is a Fellow of The Quest Project and one of the teacher educators involved. She recorded Lee Shulman’s comments below about the doctorate and the professionalization of teaching, in a conversation at a 2005 retreat dedicated to this work.