| Biographical profile |
Lee S. Shulman was the 8th President of The Carnegie Foundation, serving from 1997 to 2008. He was also the first Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and Professor (by courtesy) of Psychology at Stanford University.
Shulman was previously Professor of Educational Psychology and Medical Education at Michigan State University, serving as a member of that faculty from 1963 to 1982. He was the founding co-director of the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT) at Michigan State University from 1976. He holds all his academic degrees from the University of Chicago.
Shulman is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and of the National Academy of Education. He received AERA’s highest honor, the career award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research as well as the 1995 E.L. Thorndike Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education from the American Psychological Association’s Division of Educational Psychology. He is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was also a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2006, Shulman received the Grawemeyer Prize in education for his collected writings on teaching and teacher education, published as The Wisdom of Practice by Jossey-Bass, Inc. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2008.
His studies of medical reasoning (with Arthur Elstein) were the most thorough investigations of the cognitive processes of medical problem solving of their time and were published as Medical Problem Solving by Harvard University Press in 1978. His research group at Stanford laid the conceptual foundations for a reconsideration of the nature of teacher knowledge, with special reference to the role of pedagogical content knowledge. Based in large measure on this work, between 1985 and 1990, Shulman and his colleagues conducted the studies that supported the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Shulman’s research and writings have dealt with the study of teaching and teacher education; the growth of knowledge among those learning to teach, including pedagogical content knowledge; 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. Since 1990, Shulman has collaborated on programs and research to strengthen the role of teaching in higher education, emphasizing the importance of “teaching as community property” and the central role of a scholarship of teaching and learning in supporting the needed changes in the cultures of higher education. Shulman’s most recent emphasis of study has been the conceptualizing and description of signature pedagogies in the preparation of professionals.
|
