Lee S. Shulman (born September 28, 1938) is an American educational psychologist and reformer. He has made notable contributions to the study of teaching; assessment of teaching; education in the fields of medicine, science, and mathematics; and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Background

Shulman was born on September 28, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the only son of Jewish immigrants who owned a small delicatessen on the Northwest Side of Chicago. He attended a Yeshiva high school and married Judy Horwitz in 1960. He completed his bachelors (1959), masters (1960), and PhD (1963) at the University of Chicago, where Joseph Schwab and Benjamin Bloom were among the faculty who influenced his thinking and research interests.

Career

From 1963 to 1982, Shulman was a professor of educational psychology and medical education at Michigan State University, where he and Judith Lanier co-founded and co-directed the Institute for Research on Teaching. He then became a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he held the Charles E. Ducommun chair until 1997. He left Stanford to become the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, serving there until 2008. He is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He is an emeritus member of the National Academy of Education, where he also served as vice president and president, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Shulman has received numerous awards recognizing his educational research, including the AERA's Distinguished Career Award (1995); the American Psychological Association’s E.L. Thorndike Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education (1995); George Washington University's President's Medal (2004); the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education (2006) for his 2004 book, The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning and Learning to Teach; the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service (2007); and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education's Lifetime Achievement Award (2008). In 2018, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Haifa. Shulman is also recognized for his publications and speeches about the higher education field of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). He notably distinguished SoTL from scholarly teaching, which he described as the work "every one of us should be engaged in every day that we are in a classroom, in our office with students, tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we play pedagogically." SoTL, on the other hand, is "when we step back and reflect systematically on the teaching we have done, in a form that can be publicly reviewed and built upon by our peers." This emphasis on public review and developing a collective body of knowledge was tied to his larger point that SoTL removes the widespread experience of "pedagogical solitude" by relocating postsecondary teaching within "a community of scholars." This, in turn, will elevate the status of teaching in higher education and expand what's known about teaching and learning in higher education.

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)

Shulman introduced the concept of "pedagogical content knowledge". Shulman (1986) claimed that the emphases on teachers' subject matter knowledge and pedagogy were being treated as mutually exclusive. He believed that teacher education programs should combine the two knowledge fields. To address this dichotomy, he introduced the notion of pedagogical content knowledge that includes pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge, among other categories. His initial description of teacher knowledge included curriculum knowledge, and knowledge of educational contexts.

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