Teaching for Uncertainty
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
ICC Auditorium
When educators in the professions describe their educational mission, it is often couched in terms like "learning to think like a lawyer" or like a physician or an engineer. Underlying these conceptions of "professional learning" is a process in which the novice professionals learn to make judgments and decisions under conditions that are inherently uncertain. Over the past ten years, scholars at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have been studying the professional preparation of lawyers, clergy (priests, ministers and rabbis), nurses, engineers, physicians and teachers. We have concurrently been investigating the character of teaching in PhD programs ranging from neurosciences to mathematics and from history to English.
We have begun to identify the "signature pedagogies" of each of these fields, and to locate both distinctive practices within fields and common features across them. One of the common features of these approaches to teaching is their emphasis on preparing future practitioners, whether of professions or of scholarship, to make judgments and decisions under uncertainty. How can we best discuss these pedagogies of uncertainty and their efficacy?
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Dr. Lee S. Shulman
President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus, Stanford University.
Lee S. Shulman is the eighth president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is the first Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus and professor of psychology emeritus (by courtesy) at Stanford University. From 1963 to 1982, he served as professor of educational psychology and medical education at Michigan State University, where he founded and codirected the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT).
Shulman is past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and received its career award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, having acted as both vice president and president. He is the recipient of the American Psychological Association’s 1995 E.L. Thorndike Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education, a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and has been awarded the 2006 Grawemeyer Prize in Education.
In 2004, Shulman’s collected writings on teacher education and higher education were published by Jossey-Bass Inc., in two volumes, The Wisdom of Practice and Teaching as Community Property. He is one of the authors of Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie/Jossey Bass, 2007). His research has dealt with the quality of teaching and teacher education; knowledge growth among those learning to teach; 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. His most recent studies emphasize the central role of a “scholarship of teaching” in supporting needed changes in the cultures of higher education, and the function and features of signature pedagogies in professional education.
