Scholars Eye ‘Signature’ Method of Teacher Training
Experts say preparation programs should pursue a consistent pedagogy.
Anyone who has ever seen movies like “The Paper Chase”and “Legally Blonde”can picture what goes on in a law school classroom. The routine, repeated in law schools throughout the country, calls for an instructor to stand at the center of a semicircle of desks and pepper individual students with questions based on assigned readings of legal cases or statutes.
This familiar yet distinctive teaching style is what Lee S. Shulman, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, calls a “signature pedagogy,” a systematic, shared set of practices that distinguishes the preparation programs in a given profession. Over five years of study, Mr. Shulman and his colleagues at the Stanford University-based foundation have identified similar pedagogies to characterize training programs for doctors, members of the clergy, engineers, and possibly nurses.
Try as they might, though, the researchers could find no such trademark...
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