Complete the final reflection that addresses what you learned from the experience as related to the readings we have done in class so far.  Write a 2- to 4-page reflection on your interview

The Signature Pedagogies of the Professions of Law, Medicine,

Engineering, and the Clergy: Potential Lessons for the Education of

Teachers

Professor Lee Shulman

President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Delivered at the Math Science Partnerships (MSP) Workshop:

"Teacher Education for Effective Teaching and Learning"

Hosted by the National Research Council’s Center for Education

February 6-8, 2005

Irvine, California

MEL GEORGE: Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great pleasure now to welcome to

our midst Lee Shulman, and to ask for his wisdom and advice as we think about teacher

education. One of the things that I was so excited at his willingness to talk with us was

his ability to put things in a slightly larger frame than some of us are used to thinking

about. Lee, at one point in his life, was on the faculty at Michigan State University and

even held an appointment in medical education, even. And so he has thought about the

professions broadly, and has pondered the relationship between the preparation that other

professions use for their professional graduates as contrasted with teacher education.

And that’s a subject of great interest to me. I serve on the advisory committee for a

Center for Religion, the Professions and the Public, which is trying to think about what

professionals need to understand about the increasing religious diversity in this country,

for example. And so the notion of professional education, both pre-service and in-

service, is a very nice context in which to put our thinking about teacher education.

Lee Shulman is currently the eighth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the

Advancement of Teaching. And I did not know that its mission is described as follows:

it is “to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold and dignify the

profession of teaching.” That’s a really powerful mission statement, and we assume that

you are well on your way to accomplishing that for all time, Lee.

He’s a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and a past

president of the National Academy of Education, and a fellow of the American Academy

of Arts & Sciences. So both his background and his present position at Carnegie are a

wonderful preparation for his talk today, which is entitled “The Signature Pedagogies of

the Professions of Law, Medicine, Engineering and the Clergy: Potential Lessons for the

Education of Teachers.” It’s a great pleasure to welcome Lee Shulman.

[APPLAUSE]

PROFESSOR LEE SHULMAN: Thank you very much. The Carnegie Foundation is

now 100 years old, so we’re getting fewer and fewer excuses available if we don’t

achieve our mission. But teaching seems to be a problem that reinvents itself in every

generation. So the ones that we’re facing in 2005 bear some resemblance to those that

my predecessors saw in 1905, but they’re quite different, as well.

If someone asked me over the last 35 years, “What do you do?” I would say I’m a

teacher educator. That is the most persistent theme in my own career, from my first day

of teaching at Michigan State University in 1963– where my teaching responsibilities

were to teach 1,000 future teachers a day in two, 500-student sections–to the last course I

taught at Stanford — which was a course that I team-taught with my successor at

Stanford, Linda Darling Hammond, on the Foundations of Learning for Teaching for

future secondary school teachers of mathematics, science, English, Social Studies and

Foreign Language.

As has been explained in Dr. George’s introduction, I’ve spent a great deal of that time

trying to understand the complexities and the challenges of educating teachers by looking

through the lenses of the parallel problems and challenges of preparing people for other

professions. Because I find what professionals have to do– whether we call them

teachers or lawyers, priests or nurses– extraordinarily complex and endlessly fascinating.

The job of the arts & sciences faculty member is to bring students to a depth of critical

understanding of a discipline. The professor of history wants students to develop a critical

grasp of history. To know and understand the discipline is certainly a sufficiently

ambitious goal for any of us teaching either in the elementary and secondary or higher

education within a subject area or discipline. But when you’re preparing someone to

teach, then preparing them to know, to think, to understand what they need to understand

in order to practice is just the beginning. There is much more. The educator in a

profession is teaching someone to understand in order to act, to act in order to make a

difference in the minds and lives of others– to act in order to serve others responsibly and

with integrity. As we say in our Carnegie Foundation studies of education in the

professions, professional education is a synthesis of three apprenticeships—a cognitive

apprenticeship wherein one learns to think like a professional, a practical apprenticeship

where one learns to perform like a professional, and a moral apprenticeship where one

learns to think and act in a responsible and ethical manner that integrates across all three

domains.

A professional is not someone for whom understanding is sufficient. Understanding is

necessary, yes; but not sufficient. A professional has to be prepared to act, to perform, to

practice, whether they have enough information or not. You’ve got 32 kids in front of

you and you need to act. You can’t say, “You know, give me an hour to figure out what I

know that will help me decide what to do next.” You’ve got to act on the fly with

insufficient information. It’s true of a surgeon during an operation; it’s true of a member

of the clergy counseling the bereaved. Action is equally important, maybe more

important, than understanding.

But even that isn’t enough. As we’ve seen, as we look at education for the professions,

professionals not only have to understand and perform, they have to be certain kinds of

human beings. To use the language of the education of clergy, they have to undergo a

certain kind of formation of character and values so they become a kind of person to

whom we are prepared to entrust the responsibilities of our health system, of our

education system, of our souls and of the kind of justice we expect to see pursued in this

society.

And so a great deal of what’s involved in educating professionals is educating for

character. And we all know that you could have the most skilled classroom teacher who

understands their subject matter deeply. But if they are not a person of character, there’s

something deeply deficient there. And so when we look at professions, we are looking at

the challenge of teaching people to understand, to act, and to be integrated into a complex

of knowing, doing and being.

At Carnegie, we are now in the midst of a 10 year study to understand how people are

prepared for practice in law, engineering, the clergy, teaching, nursing and medicine.

We’ve essentially finished our work in the first three fields. We’re now writing up our

studies of the education of lawyers, engineers and clergy. And we are pursuing the work

on teaching, nursing and medicine.

I want to speak to you this morning about some of the insights that I’ve been having as a

teacher-educator as well as someone who’s spent about a decade of my life in a medical

school as a medical educator looking across all of these fields. We can learn a great deal

from looking at those fields; just as it will turn out they have a great deal to learn from us.

Let me begin by describing what I was doing about two weeks ago.

About two weeks ago, at about 7:30 in the morning, I parked my car and went to the

ninth floor of the teaching hospital of a major American medical school to join a team for

the whole morning to do clinical rounds in internal medicine. It had been years since I

had done that. In fact, it had been since the mid-point of my career at Michigan State, in

about 1972. And it reminded me of both the excitement and, in a very interesting way,

the routine associated with clinical rounds.

Clinical rounds are the way the practice of medicine is taught. Clinical rounds go on

every single morning of the week, Saturdays and Sundays included. Clinical rounds

involve a multigenerational team: the chief resident, who is usually in her fourth year of

post-M.D. training, a senior resident, usually in his or her second or third year post-M.D.,

a couple of first-year residents, several third-year medical students in their first rotation

as medical students, and a pharmacy intern.

We had a set of patients to visit. And with a few exceptions, they were the same patients

the team visited the day before, and the day before that. One of the interesting things that

are happening in the world of medicine that is changing medical education dramatically

is that the curriculum materials of clinical medicine instruction– which has been

constituted of patients lying in beds– is becoming much more transient. When I started

in medical education, if you were having your gallbladder out, you were going to be in a

hospital for 8 to 10 days. That meant that the “curriculum” stayed in place for that long.

My administrative assistant had her gallbladder removed six months ago,

laparoscopically. She didn’t spent one night in the hospital. She was admitted in the

morning, remained in recovery for a few hours after the procedure, and she was in the

recovery; she was home that night. Well, great for her, great for cost control in the health

care system. But what a pain for medical education! You know, what would happen if

the pages in your textbook disappeared before you had a chance to read them carefully?

I mention this because of the fact that what I’m going to be talking about this morning,

which I call the “signature pedagogies of the professions,” are not eternal and

unchanging. Even though they seem remarkably stable at any one point in time, they are

always subject to change as conditions in the practice of the profession itself and in the

institutions that provide professional service or care undergo larger societal change.

But we were visiting patients that, alas, were there for longer periods of time. And what

was fascinating is the routinization, almost to the point of ritual, of clinical rounds. You

come to a room where a patient who is on our docket is in bed. Somebody on the team

knows that their responsibility is to report on a patient, and then to explain what’s

happened since the last time they rounded, what’s going to happen next, and then to take

questions about the situation from colleagues on the team. The routine is such that

everybody knows what they’re supposed to do.

Equally fascinating was the observation that it was often unclear who the teachers were

and who were the learners. At times it was the third year clerk who presented the case,

and everybody else was learning from that person. At other times it was the senior

resident. And so the roles of students and teachers were changing. Unlike a lot of

educational situations, everyone was visible, nobody could hide. That’s a very

interesting feature of signature pedagogies. Everybody was a member of the clinical

team with a role and responsibilities, and could be expected to ask or answer a question,

or perform an examination or procedure, at any moment. Hiding was impossible;

anonymity wasn’t an option.

And because of the fact that the “rules of engagement” of clinical rounds had become so

routine, the teachers didn’t spend any time at all with what you might call “classroom

management.” And by that I don’t mean “discipline,” because clearly that wasn’t much

of a problem. They did not need to practice classroom management in the sense that

those of us who use group work in our classrooms, have to give the students a fair

amount of instruction about what it means to be a member of a collaborative group, what

their roles and responsibilities are, and how do they decide who’s in charge. The power

of routinization in signature pedagogies is such that those questions have already been

answered. The rules of the game are clear.

On that morning, we progressed through four different kinds of rounds. I’m not going to

go into the details, but they went from work rounds to teaching rounds to something

called “M&M, morbidity and mortality reviews, in which we systematically looked at

cases that hadn’t gone well and asked what had gone badly and what we can learn from

the experience that could guide individual clinical practice in the future. And then a