In considering the challenges of basic skills education, Shulman returns to the advice of one of his mentors, Benjamin Bloom. The reason students fail, according to Bloom, is that they need more time to succeed, and time is what educators fail to give them. According to Bloom, nearly anybody can learn nearly anything given enough time. The…

In an insightful commentary, the author ruminates on the dilemmas of coaching in the context of high-stakes testing. [Drawn from an essay titled "Send Me in, Coach!" that the author has written for a future issue of "The New Teacher," a journal published by the City University of New York.]

The authors point out that offices of institutional research are valuable resources for collecting data to help faculty improve their teaching, and can involve the whole institution in a collaborative effort towards improved student learning. Defining institutional research as a capacity to work closely with faculty to explore questions about what…

The writer describes a site visit to the teaching hospital of a major American medical school, part of the Carnegie Foundation's ten-year program of research on how lawyers, engineers, clergy, school teachers, nurses, and physicians are taught and how they learn. Of particular note to Schulman was an exercise known as "M&M" (Morbidity and…

Serious work on education is never just a work of the moment. Some problems are the consequences of yesterday's solutions, and many of the most promising approaches to today's issues build on the efforts of earlier generations. In short, the work that is going on presently at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching must be…

The author offers thoughts on emerging pictures and consequences if the teacher is considered the primary agent of his or her own accountability. Noting the current wave of calls for educational accountability, Shulman suggests that typical mechanisms for ensuring quality often miss much of what actually goes on in classrooms, and that looking…

This article discusses the Carnegie Foundation's newly released report, "Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination," and offers recommendations on how to develop specific skills needed to perform the functions that pastors must enact, while also giving them the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to become the kinds…

This paper, by the President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, advances the need for scholarship in teaching. Just as research is not done until it has been shared, this is true also of scholarship in teaching: it is not private, but public; it is made available to and is critically reviewed by peers; it can be built upon…

In a response to comments by Rodney Evans on an earlier "Educational Researcher" (ER) article that the author cowrote with three colleagues at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the author shows that Evans' critique is based largely on a misreading or misrepresentation of their argument, its rationale, and associated…

Reviews programs such as the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and literature on the scholarship of teaching at the higher education level. Suggests that the scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching, but requires faculty to "go meta," to systematically investigate questions of student learning.…

This paper argues that a real profession involves a community of people committed to ensuring that they individually and collectively develop the capacity to learn from experience, so they can serve the social responsibilities or needs to which they are committed. It explains that there are six commonplaces inevitably associated with a profession…