Unlearning and Relearning from Medical Education Research: Teacher Education Research in the Pursuit of Teacher Professionalism

Abstract

Educational researchers have increasingly paid attention to how practitioners can access and utilize research knowledge, but the field still has been unable to create a research tradition and corresponding diffusion model that directly and uniformly influences teachers' practice. One reason for this is the contested status of teaching as a profession and the competing interests, as well as clashing research assumptions, about knowledge in education. This article explores the field of medical education research to understand, from a comparative approach, how members of an established profession use research knowledge to increase expert practitioner skill. Based on a comparison that considers the fundamental differences in education and medicine, the article calls for the unification of a scholarly community that provides tangible theory and evidence that can be explicitly used by professors of education, student teacher supervisors, instructional coaches, professional development providers, and teachers to guide their daily work practices.