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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

PROF. SHULMAN: “Ms. Conroy” Please tell us about the case of Brown v. Board of

Education.” And you would not be free to say whatever you felt like about Brown v.

Board of Education, because that is a trigger, in the same way that it is in medicine, for a

routine protocol of performance, literally, of rendering an account of the case. You are

being taught “to think like a lawyer.” And I don’t care if you’re at the University of

Colorado Law School or at the New York University Law School, or at the John F.

Kennedy Law School in Oakland, the engagement rules are the same, much as they are

doing clinical rounds in medicine.

But what we also will know– what all of you law students will know– is that at any

second, the teacher-as-sniper can pivot and say, “And Mr. Labov! Do you agree with

Ms. Conroy’s account of the case, or do you disagree?”

JAY LABOV: Disagree.

PROF. SHULMAN: Disagree! Thank you very much. Before you tell me your

disagreement, I’d like you to restate in your own words Ms. Conroy’s argument, and then

offer your own. Notice, I am also conveying subtly, you’d better be paying attention,

closely, to what your colleagues are saying.

In elementary education research, there’s a lovely concept called “accountable talk,” or

“accountable speech.” And what’s so important for kids and teachers to learn is that

when you’re participating in a discussion, your contributions are accountable for their

continuity with those that preceded and with the text or source materials on which the

conversation is based.

You can’t simply say, “Well, you know, the way I feel is.” No, you are responsible to

add one link to a chain of discourse. And so one of the other things you see in the law

school class that, to me, is directly parallel to the clinical rounds is that even in large

room, students feel accountable. They are visible, they never know when they will be

asked to perform, and they had better be ready. They also know precisely what it means

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to perform. The faculty is not playing hide-the-ball; the students understand the form of

what is expected of them, even if they often do not know the particulars.

I give these two examples, and I could give others from other fields, of what I have been

calling lately “the signature pedagogies of the professions.” What I mean by“signature

pedagogy” is a mode of teaching that has become inextricably identified with preparing

people for a particular profession. This means it has three characteristics: One, it’s

distinctive in that profession. So you wouldn’t expect clinical rounds in a law school.

And even though it might be very effective, you wouldn’t expect a case dialogue or case

method teaching of this sort in a medical school.

Second, it is pervasive within the curriculum. So that students learn that as they go from

course to course, there are certain continuities that thread through the program that are

part of what it means to learn to “think like a lawyer,” or “think like a physician,” or

“think like a priest.” There are certain kinds of thinking that are called for in the rules of

engagement of each course, even as you go from subject to subject. The third feature is

another aspect of pervasiveness, which cuts across institutions and not only courses.

Signature pedagogies have become essential to general pedagogy of an entire profession,

as elements of instruction and of socialization.

What are some of the characteristics of these pedagogies? I’ve mentioned a couple

already. The first is that they are habitual, they are routine. The rules of engagement in

this kind of pedagogy are repeated again and again and again. And it doesn’t seem to

make the classes boring, which is really quite interesting. Many of us who’ve taught at

earlier grades have been taught the importance of novelty: “keep changing things for the

students, because novelty breeds motivation and interest,” we were told. We advocate

constant novelty without taking sufficient cognizance of the strain it places on the

students and on the teacher, of constantly changing the rules of the game.

And it’s not at all unusual for new teachers, when they want to try something new with

their classroom, simultaneously to change the grouping structure, to do a simulation for

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the first time, to experiment with role-play and other novel instructional elements.

Indeed, it’s not unusual for a novice teacher to change about four features at once, and

then wonder why the whole thing goes up in smoke. And they spent so much time

planning it, “And don’t those kids care how much, and how hard I worked?”

Tears are not unusual in those circumstances, especially with our new teachers.

They really haven’t thought through how important it is to keep control over the sources

of unpredictability and variation and challenge that the students are being asked to

confront at the same time. And what’s fascinating in the signature pedagogies of these

professions is the extent to which the novelty comes from the subject matter itself, not

from constantly changing the pedagogical rules.

A second thing, you see, is that both the students and their thought processes are made

visible in the signature pedagogies of the professions. I don’t know if you’ve seen

videotapes of large lectures in the liberal arts and sciences in colleges and universities.

But you show me a classroom with 200 students in it for a 9:00 o’clock class, and you

just pan your little video. Students are sleeping, or they’re reading the paper. If it’s a

wireless environment, they’re on the net. The level of attention and vigilance on the part

of the students is frighteningly low. But again, we can encounter the same phenomenon

in classes of 35 as well because so many of our pedagogies aren’t designed to keep

everybody visible and on their toes.

In the signature pedagogies, whether they involve small groups like a design lab in an

engineering or architecture program, or large groups like the core courses in the law

school or the business school, students know that at any moment in time, they are visible

and accountable. They will not only be asked to comment on the topic. But regularly,

they will be asked to build on the contributions of those who spoke before them.

The nature of the pedagogy in many of these cases– and again, it’s part of the ritual– is

not only to say, “Mr. Labov, what’s your view?” But it to immediately say, “And what

might be your argument in support of that view? Are you using different evidence from

Ms. Conroy’s, or the same evidence? And why did you think that evidence was….” So

the thought processes themselves become highly visible.

I believe we are now seeing the emergence of what I believe is going to be new signature

pedagogy in higher education in large classes in which students now are being given

these wonderful wireless “clickers.” You know those? When each student in the large

lecture class pushes a button in response to a question from the teacher, not only is her

view being registered, but the teacher knows who is clicking. The teacher has a running

record of each student’s responses over time. We have created conditions of visibility

and accountability in the heretofore vapid anonymity of the large lecture hall.

Thus a feature of signature pedagogies is the visibility of person and process, which is

therefore associated with accountability. And it’s remarkable, at all levels of the

educational system, how low students’ sense of accountability is. You can go through

two weeks in many elementary school classrooms without being held accountable for

contributing to the class discussion. And you may do your worksheets, but that

accountability is simply acknowledged by a score or grade at the top when it’s handed

back.

This kind of accountability is not only students’ accountability to the teacher; it’s an

accountability students have to one another in the sense that most of these pedagogies

involve the learners having to engage in accountable talk, to build on each others’ work.

Whether it’s actively collaborative, as it might be in collaborative groups in a calculus

classroom, or it’s serially collaborative, as in a law school or a medical school exchange,

I suspect this is a distinctive feature of signature pedagogies.

What happens when people who are used to being invisible, to burrowing down when

faced with a pedagogical challenge, suddenly or regularly find themselves visible,

accountable, and if you will, vulnerable? You inevitably begin to experience higher

levels of emotion in a classroom. There’s a sense of risk. There’s a sense of

unpredictability. There’s a sense of– dare I say– anxiety. And for some, anxiety morphs

into terror.

As a psychologist, I would argue that a certain measure of anxiety is adaptive for

learning. It’s good to be a little anxious; it leads to more attention and vigilance. But

while moderate anxiety is adaptive, terror is paralyzing, and one of the great pedagogical

challenges is to create an environment that is simultaneously risky but not paralytic.

That’s why teaching is tough. And in law schools, we know that at least the stereotype is

that the sadistic law professor values terror and tries to promote it. I’m not sure what the

evidence for that is; we certainly know that it can often be experienced that way.

On the other hand, when public, accountable interaction becomes a signature pedagogy

and it becomes routine, it al

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