Merging Content Knowledge and Pedagogy: An Interview with Lee Shulman
by Dennis SparksJournal of Staff Development, Winter 1992 (Vol. 13, No. 1)
(Editor's Note: Lee Shulman is professor of education, Stanford University, School of Education.)
JSD: In the past few years, some of the most popular staff development programs have been generic that is, they have been used with all teachers no matter what grade level or subjects they teach. You had advocated staff development that is more content specific.
Shulman: I think that there is a great deal to be learned from the generic approaches. But at the same time, I've been struck by how incomplete these programs are and how much they leave unexamined that is absolutely essential to improving teaching. Teachers never teach something in general -- they always teach particular things to particular groups of kids in particular settings.
Let me give you an example. What do you have to know about mathematics and about your students to fashion the appropriate anticipatory set before you begin a unit on signed numbers in mathematics? We know a great deal about the problems of understanding positive and negative numbers, about the common misunderstandings students bring to the study of such a topic before the instruction begins, and about the subsequent consequences for future learning if students fail to grasp the essential nature of signed numbers. We also know a great deal about a whole host of strategies for teaching signed numbers. Unfortunately, when the generic staff development is done, people are often left with a general grasp of what it means to establish an anticipatory set, but none of the particulars. Teachers need a substantial amount of subject-specific examples, analyses, and practice within their staff development programs.
JSD: Why is subject-specific staff development so important?
Shulman: Individuals who have studied teaching and learning over the past decade have become increasingly convinced that most human learning and teaching is highly specific and situated. There is much less broad transfer and generalizability from one domain to another than we have thought. For instance, think about what students do to learn something like physics and mathematics as opposed to what they do when studying literature or history. Then think about the implications of the fact that a lot of the direct instruction research that is the basis for so much staff development grew out of the skills represented in mathematics, physics, and some areas of reading.
The idea of guided practice, for instance, relates to the fact that the skills-related aspects of learning and teaching the subject matter can be divided into discrete units such as problem sets in mathematics or word-attack skills in reading. But what kind of guided practice do you give when you're not talking about a field that breaks up into discrete units, but instead calls for understanding and appreciating a story? The study of history is filled with narration, exposition and extended pieces of text where the notion of guided practice makes much less sense. These are different enterprises that demand very different instructional models.
JSD: Does that mean that an elementary teacher who does a good job in teaching mathematics may not do such a good job in social studies?
Shulman: That's true for a number of reasons, one of which is that those areas can make utterly different subject-matter demands. For example, Susan Stodolsky has pointed out, in a marvelous book called The Subject Matters, that elementary school teachers act very differently with the same students when they shift from teaching math to teaching social studies and back again. They do not have a generic teaching style, but quite dramatically adapt their teaching to the material being taught.
In another vein, the explanations and examples offered to students, or the stories they are told, are quite specific to subject matters. Explaining to seventh graders how the concept of "work" in physics differs from the same concept in everyday language, or why we invert and multiply to divide fractions by fractions, demands a store of topic-specific examples and clarifications. Just knowing that you should "check for understanding" doesn't get you too far.
JSD: The implication of what you are saying is that while generic forms of staff development are appropriate, teachers also need very focused forms of staff development that both improves teachers content knowledge and pedagogical approaches for a particular subject area.
Shulman: That's right. As staff developers, we have two alternatives, and we have an obligation to explore the efficacy of these alternatives. One alternative is to divide staff development into two genres -- the general and the content specific. In the general form we do things pretty much as we do them now, which is often quite powerful. In the content-specific form, we divide teachers into sub-groups by content and the levels at which they teach and then organize groups of teachers around specific content domains, themes or processes. The teachers would examine alternative cases or ways of teaching the same ideas and explore in depth both the substantive ideas and their pedagogy. For example, in math we might spend an entire session on signed numbers. Why are positive and negative numbers so critical? Why are they so hard for many students to grasp? What kinds of representations clarify these ideas and what are their limitations? Deborah Ball has published a case, for example, in which she explores her teaching of positive and negative numbers to a third grade class using analogies as different as the movement of elevators in a high-rise with many floors below the ground to the transfer of money from one individual to another (If I had 10 cents and owed you 15...).
Other content-specific examples include: How do you explain the classification of living things as a prelude to taxonomies and phyla? How do you help students grasp what the theme of a story is and how they might discern it ? How do students learn to think about the scale of a map and the problems of projection? All these are core concepts in each content area, and staff development should be directed at helping all teachers improve their teaching of core ideas that are particularly challenging to teach and learn.
The second alternative is one that I use in my preservice teacher training. With this option we look for every opportunity to teach the general through the specific. Instead of saying, "Let's talk about multicultural education, "I'm more likely to take one of the cases in Judy Shulman's Intern Teacher Casebook in which Vicki White, a Los Angeles teacher, describes a week or so of her teaching in which she tried to teach Romeo and Juliet to an all-black high school class. Vicki is black and grew up in the same neighborhood.
My class worked through this case of Vicki's teaching while at the same time looking at Act I of Romeo and Juliet, which is what Vicki is teaching. My class is composed of prospective teachers representing five different domains—English, social studies, mathematics, foreign language, and science. As the class moves through the particulars of the challenges that Romeo and Juliet presents linguistically and culturally in terms of prior knowledge and skills, I repeatedly try to move between this specific case of teaching Shakespeare and something more general. I may turn to a biology teacher at a certain point and ask, "Are there any experiences that you have had that this case reminds you of?" When you approach staff development through content, it is likely to be richer and more textured. What I'm talking about is a kind of staff development that we haven't had much practice doing. It calls upon staff developers to develop new kinds of skills and understandings. In my experience, this is a very powerful form of staff development.
As with most assertions in staff development, I have no firm evidence to support these claims. But for the past couple of decades, I have conducted research on both new and veteran teachers and the assessment of their quality. We have observed repeatedly how critical the mastery of content and pedagogy is for the development of teachers, over and above their ability to manage a class. We have seen how teachers falter for lack of a clear analogy or explanation, for want of a way to connect a Shakespearean text or a Darwinian concept to the experiences of California or Michigan adolescents. I don't feel I need to conduct a series of experiments comparing two forms of staff development to assert. "Based on my research and that of many others on the knowledge used in good teaching, I am confident that content and topic-specific staff development is essential.
JSD: What's required of staff developers to do what you're suggesting?
Shulman: We as staff developers will have to spend a lot more of our time studying content in some depth. We will have to become much more curriculum literate because the most powerful form of staff development occurs at the intersection of content and pedagogy. That means that we must read and go to workshops so that we understand the core concepts and major issues in several content areas. If a staff developer said, "I can't possibly be knowledgeable in several areas," I would remind that person that this is what we currently expect of elementary teachers and principals.
JSD: You've raised an important issue. How can the average elementary teacher or principal have the depth of subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical skill for all the subjects taught at that level?
Shulman: First, we need to acknowledge that teachers will be better at some subjects than at others. This is a point at which we can recognize the important role preservice education plays. In the State of California, for example, teachers are expected to have four years of undergraduate preparation before they begin their teacher training. How are they spending those four years? For these new teachers, at least, their undergraduate preparation provides them with the opportunity to learn something in each of the areas they're going to be teaching, and that opportunity ought to be taken seriously.
Here a very real problem is the quality of undergraduate instruction. To be generous, it is highly variable. Some of the worst teaching any of us has experienced took place in college and university classrooms. Therein lies the reason why so many teacher are subject-matter deficient. But it is no excuse. We must begin to demand much higher standards of teaching and learning in the universities. We must refrain from recommending anyone for a credential who doe not display high levels of competence in understanding the subjects he or she will teach. We must craft our staff development so it keeps our teachers at the frontier of understanding of the problems, topics, and issues that constitute the curriculum. We must overcome the liabilities we inherit from the poor quality of much undergraduate instruction.
I would also say that I don't think that it's unrealistic to expect staff developers to participate in content seminars in which for a few days they study the main issues that ought to be attended to in a particular curriculum area.. Staff developers should also be reading good books -- they ought to be reading history and literature as well as professional journals. The answer to your question comes down to a combination of properly planned and delivered undergraduate program followed by appropriate continuing education, including a good deal of personal reading.
JSD: In many school districts, the individuals you describe already exist in the role of the curriculum specialist. If you were in charge of a school district, would you have curriculum specialists -- who have a deep knowledge of the discipline -- and staff developers both be involved in instruction improvement? Or would curriculum specialists be staff developers?
Shulman: I would be very reluctant to hire any staff developers who did not bring along with them expertise in some depth in at least one curriculum area. Conversely, I would not want to hire a curriculum person who was not prepared or willing to become prepared as a staff developer building upon his or her curriculum understanding. Maybe part of what we need is more programs where curriculum people and staff developers make presentations together. I believe that we would have a very different tone in our faculty development programs if we taught the generic skills through the content rather than having either the content ignored entirely or waved at periodically in some ritualistic manner.
JSD: Earlier you referred to the use of a case study in teaching your class. Case studies are not often used in staff development programs. Are you an advocate of that approach?
Shulman: I'm more than an advocate—I'm an evangelist! When you use real teaching cases, you are always dealing with the particular. The case includes information about the subject matter, the curriculum, the class, the school and sometimes the community. If it doesn't have that kind of texture, it's more like a riddle than a case.
A well crafted case has drama and a narrative quality. We've learned in other research that narrative quality is often more compelling than an expository presentation of the same ideas. Cases also tend to lend themselves to questions of action. They combine general and theoretical notions with questions about what can be done in this particular situation and why. That's a very important type of staff development. Case studies have been used very successfully in business schools and in mid-career programs for business leaders, in the law and medicine, and in the military. Case-based teaching is quite powerful in fields where action is the bottom line.
JSD: Let's deal with a broader issue. How do things have to be changed to support teachers becoming career-long students of both content and pedagogy?
Shulman: It will have to be done in different ways in different communities and at the elementary and secondary levels. I do have a couple of ideas, however, that might be applied any place. First, I would like to see built into the teacher's day regularly scheduled content seminars. Once a week, teachers would come together -- say at the elementary level -- to study mathematics or geography.
If we did that sort of thing, there would be much less complaining by the community about staff development. When you say, for instance that you're doing something even as virtuous as cooperative learning, the community may not view it as serious. But you say that for the 10 weeks of the fall our elementary teachers are going to study an hour a week in a special seminar on new developments in mathematics, people will view it as something of substance. And in the course of studying mathematics, teachers would inevitably get at the issues of teaching it.
In the winter, we would be able to tell our community that our teacher are studying modern geography, and that in the spring we'll be looking at new approaches to literature. Those things sound serious because they are serious. Unless those seminars were done badly, they would enliven teachers' interest in mathematics and geography and literature. That hour would be time set aside for teaches as learners in which pedagogy would permeate the discussion. Teachers must continually be supported in the study of those concepts, ideas, and skills that they are responsible for teaching.
My second ideas is the introduction into our schools of instructional case conferences. These conferences would be parallel in some ways to the case conferences held in teaching hospitals. Once a week or every two weeks a different teacher could take responsibility for presenting a case of teaching and learning. This isn't a case of a kid gone bad, but looking at instructional issues of some substance. The case presenter might say: "Year after year, we have this problem of having kids not understand what is means to divide by zero. They never get it right. Today, I'm going to talk about a series of things we did to remedy that this year and the evidence we have about improvement. Let me begin with a few minutes of explanation of what it means to divide by zero..." This could be followed by an account of common mistakes kids make and the recurrent difficulties they have. The teacher might show examples from students' learning portfolios of some of the recurrent errors kids make. Later in the case conference, the teacher might show a segment of video or other examples from portfolios to illustrate where students are now. Those kinds of things are powerful forms of staff development that could be enormously exciting and don't necessarily involve staff developers.
JSD: What do you think are the most valid objections that are raised about your work, and how do you respond to those criticisms?
Shulman: There are two kinds of valid criticisms. One is that I don't give enough credit to the impact that generic approaches have had. That's an absolutely valid criticism. My rhetoric in the past has been too negative about generic approaches, and I think I was wrong. My argument now is not that they are evil, but that they are incomplete. The incompleteness leads to a deficiency in staff development that we have an obligation to overcome.
The second objection is that it is unrealistic to expect staff developers to know everything they know now and also know enough about the content as well to do what I'm asking for. My response is that it is unrealistic for staff developers to think that at a time when our national goals are very heavily content based, they can continue to provide generic solutions to content-specific problems. The realistic thing to do is for us to change the set of understandings that we as staff developers have. We have got to change with the times, and this is a change that is long overdue.
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