Lee Shulman
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

When an exhibition begins to remind you of something you wrote more than twenty years ago, it’s pretty solid evidence that (a) you’re getting old, but (b) your memory hasn’t failed you entirely.  So when I tour this digital exhibition, I find myself thinking back more than twenty years, to my AERA presidential address of 1984 in which I first imagined what a case literature in teaching and teacher education might look like, and looking ahead to what this kind of collection might portend for the future of teacher education and professional development.

When examining the gallery of websites we have before us, I look at them through the lenses of my own scholarly history, and I see them as an exhibition of cases.  When I proceed sequentially through the sites following the order of the slideshow, I am reminded of the variety of ways in which cases can be organized, sequenced and commented upon.  These kinds of arrangements become case books in fields like Law and Business.  I know that websites are not cases in some simple sort of equivalence.  But they are rich records of practice, of the practical wisdom and strategic errors that teachers perform regularly, along with critical reviews and reflections the likes of which have not been available in the past.   We traditionally think of cases as forms of narrative with a plot that unfolds from beginning to middle to end; these websites typically have narratives embedded in them—explicitly or implicitly—but they are potentially far more than that.

A number of years ago (Shulman, 1985), I argued that we would reach a point in the development of teacher education when case-based knowledge would be as important as principled knowledge.  But the concept of a “case” was not simple.  There were several genres of case, each with a particular set of functions and properties.  There were also hybrids of function, genres of cases through which multiple functions were performed.   How well does that set of categories map on to the sites we have before us?

I then proposed several types of cases. Precedents are cases that capture and communicate concrete examples of practice.  They offer detailed accounts of how certain kinds of teaching performances can be undertaken.  Prototypes exemplify theoretical principles.  These are cases that represent clear instances of conceptual or theoretical constructs.  Parables convey norms or values. They exemplify the enactment of values like social justice, high expectations, or equality of opportunity.  They can be “visions of the possible” that overcome beliefs about what can or cannot be accomplished with students in certain types of settings.  Naturally, a given case can accomplish more than a single function; it can, for example, serve as both prototype of a concept like, say, “accountable talk” in a language arts classroom, as well as a precedent that presents in some detail the practical procedures and strategies applied by one or more teachers to accomplish accountable talk in their classrooms.  We can explore what we mean by each of these types, and how they might apply to the websites displayed in our gallery.

We are probably most accustomed to thinking of cases as precedents, as narratives or demonstrations of practice.  Thus, a site becomes a place to study how to engage in a particular kind of teaching.  Knowledge of how an exemplary teacher taught a particular lesson, or the way a teacher brought a classroom of misbehaving youngsters under control sticks in our minds. These remembrances of teachings past are valuable in guiding the work of teachers, both as a source for specific ideas and as a heuristic to stimulate new thinking.   

As an example, a few months ago a senior teacher in an international school in Asia wrote to Desiree Pointer Mace after discovering the site documenting and analyzing Jennifer Myers’ work on readers’ workshop.   She had been looking for vivid examples of readers’ workshop to use with her own faculty and had despaired of finding any until she encountered Jennifer’s site.  Here is a clear instance of the site as a representation of practice, and the kind of use to which it could be put.  Someone can study Jennifer Myers’ site and use it as a basis for developing a set of procedures for implementing a readers and writers workshop curriculum. 

But other kinds of cases exemplify, illustrate, and bring alive the theoretical propositions that are potentially the most powerful tools teachers can have. These are the prototypes within case knowledge.  We have many theoretical principles that pepper our ed-talk, but often may have quite unclear analogues in the practical experience of teachers.  For example, we constantly speak of teachers’ need to “scaffold” student learning.  What does scaffolding look like?  We can comb through the variety of examples in the exhibition and index many instructive instances of scaffolding (the Yvonne Divans Hutchinson site alone is replete with examples of scaffolding, from the formal use of reading guides to informal strategies of engagement she uses in the classroom).  In this manner we use the cases as prototypes of key principles, concepts or theories.

Parallel to the theoretical use of prototype cases and the practical use of precedents, we also encounter the moral or normative value of parables. A parable is a case whose value lies in the communication of values and norms, propositions that occupy the very heart of teaching as profession and as craft.  A number of the sites in this gallery carry powerful normative messages about how teachers ought to deal with their students.  They convey images of the vast capabilities of students to learn, interact and perform when teachers hold high expectations, engage in carefully designed, actively enacted and carefully critiqued instruction.  Some of these cases are so memorable, I believe, that they will become canonical in our field, just as others have become canonical in law, medicine or business.

Moreover, if we look at the literature on effective organizations and what keeps them working well and their members collaborating enthusiastically, we discover the importance of myths in organizations—tales about heroic figures or memorable events that somehow capture the values of those organizations and communicate them to everyone working within them. Those myths, I would argue, or their case equivalents—pedagogical parables—would be equally important in the socialization of teachers into their general professional obligations as well as into the special ethos of particular schools or districts as organizations.  Indeed, truly powerful cases become canonical, when they are used by many educators across many settings to illustrate principles, maxims and norms. 

In the world of mathematics education, the now-famous 15 minutes of Deborah Ball’s teaching that we call “the Shea Numbers case” has earned the status of a pedagogical myth.  The Shea Numbers vignette is an example of a case record that can play all three functions of cases.  As a prototype, it is a case of several central concepts of teaching and learning, as well as of discussion of central ideas in elementary arithmetic.  It can also be studied as a precedent for practice, illustrating Ball’s techniques of engaging students actively in mathematical conversations around big ideas.  It’s also a parable, a moral narrative and a vision of the possible. 

This three-way distinction which I introduced (but rarely elaborated) so many years ago has recently reappeared in some of the work that we at the Carnegie  Foundation have been undertaking in the area of professional educational more broadly.  As we study the education of lawyers, clergy, engineers, nurses and physicians, we have concluded that there are three kinds of apprenticeship that must interact in the education of a professional: a cognitive apprenticeship for the learning of facts, concepts, principles and strategies; a practical apprenticeship for the learning of skills, techniques, practices, and protocols; and a moral apprenticeship for the learning of values and norms, and for the development of a proper professional identity.

The “slide show” feature illustrates how any number of individual sites can be organized and sequenced into a program or curriculum.  They also remind us of the flexibility of these kinds of representation, and the many ways we can order, compare and contrast cases of practice.  The multiplicity of representations serves as a vaccine against the most dangerous versions of “best practice,” those that imply that there exists a single best way to achieve specific educational ends.  At the same time, this array can remind us that there are certainly “better practices” and that they may share some common distinctive features. 

It certainly is not the case that only case records of practice can be effective pedagogical tools for supporting the development of teachers.  Indeed, we must crisply articulate and define the theoretical, practical and moral principles that our apprenticeships, direct experiences, and the vicarious experiences provided by cases and websites afford.  Articulated principles have an economy and clarity that other forms of discourse or demonstration rarely provide.  Nevertheless, while principles are powerful, cases are memorable.  They can combine the vividness of narrative with the impressiveness of observation and thus join with principles to provide particularly resilient and adaptive forms of professional learning.  

So what might exhibitions like this one, and the underlying multimedia forms of case record it represents, portend for the future of our field?  In my 1984 AERA address, I shared the following fantasies with my colleagues:

I envision the use of case method in teacher education, whether in our classrooms or in special laboratories with simulations, videodisks and annotated scripts, as a means for developing strategic understanding, for extending capacities toward professional judgment and decision making. …

I envision the design of research-based programs of teacher education that grow to accommodate our conceptions of both process and content. These programs will articulate with and build upon instruction in the liberal arts and sciences as well as the specialty content areas of each candidate. Instruction in the liberal arts and content areas will have to improve dramatically to meet the standards of understanding required for teaching. If these are special sections of such courses for teachers, they will entail evaluation of subject-matter treatment, not watering down. Such programs will draw upon the growing research on the pedagogical structure of student conceptions and misconceptions, on those features that make particular topics easy or difficult to learn. They will extensively employ a growing body of case literature, both to represent a far wider and more diverse range of teaching contexts than can possibly be experienced within any one teacher education program, and to provide teachers with a rich body of prototypes, precedents, and parables from which to reason.

The fact that we do not possess such a case literature at this time suggests new agendas for research in teacher education. In addition to the obvious tack of encouraging the continued growth of disciplined case studies of teaching by scholars, another alternative suggests itself. Fred Erickson has noted that one of the exciting features of case studies is that you don’t necessarily have to be a PhD social scientist or educator to learn to prepare useful case materials. Given proper preparation and support, teachers and teacher educators can contribute to the case literature themselves. As they do so, they will begin to feel even more membership in the broader academic guild of professional teachers. (Shulman, 1985)
           

In 2006, as I review sites like these, along with the broader body of work of the Carnegie Foundation’s Knowledge Media Lab and the potential of other groups like Teachscape, Lesson Lab, their collaborators and competitors, I am confident that the era I envisioned is now upon us.  It’s an exciting time, and this is an exciting set of representations.  

References

Shulman, L (1985). On teaching problem-solving and the solving of the problems of teaching, in E. A. Silver (Ed.) Teaching and learning mathematical problem solving: Multiple research perspectives (pp. 439- 450). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14.

An exhibition slide show and accompanying discussion (pdf) address 3 questions: