Domains : Professional Education

Lee Shulman has had a long and deep association with professional education. One of his earliest contributions to the field was a study of medical decision-making he conducted in collaboration with Arthur Elstein, a colleague in the medical school, and Sarah Sprafka. In this influential study, Shulman and his colleagues studied the thinking of expert medical diagnosticians as they engaged in clinical diagnosis (Elstein, Shulman, & Sprafka, 1978).

Two themes from this early work on professional practice resonated throughout Shulman’s career: a focus on professional judgment under conditions of uncertainty and the domain-specificity of professional
expertise. Other themes also began appearing, including the role of
cases in professional knowledge and education.

Shulman believed that teaching was no less cognitively complex than medicine, and that teachers, like doctors, engaged in acts of decision- making and professional judgment that informed their practice. These ideas took root in a panel report for the National Institute of Education on future directions for educational research, entitled “Teaching as Clinical Information Processing” (National Institute of Education, 1975). The NIE report represented teaching as a cognitively complex, multi-faceted deliberative activity and helped stimulate the cognitive turn in research on teaching. It was during this same time that Shulman and Judith Lanier successfully competed with Stanford for the Institute for Research on Teaching, which moved to Michigan State University in [date?].

Shulman’s deep interest in professional practice and its implications for professional education was most fully developed once he assumed the presidency of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Almost immediately, Shulman launched the Preparation for the Professions Program, a comparative set of studies on how professionals are prepared for practice in the areas of the clergy, engineering, medicine, nursing, and law. These studies generated not only a set of influential reports each of the professions (link to Carnegie page which shows the books), but also produced broader comparative frameworks and concepts for looking across professional education. These include: the notion of signature pedagogies that define professional education in a specific field; the metaphor of rounds and rotations for exploring the breadth and depth of clinical experiences; and the concept of the three interacting apprenticeships that ground professional education: “a cognitive apprenticeship, where a novice learns to think like a doctor, nurse or lawyer; an apprenticeship of practice, where one learns to perform like a teacher, engineer or priest; and a moral apprenticeship, where the neophyte learns to “be” the kind of human being entitled to serve others in these ways.”