Lee Shulman at Georgetown University's Provost's Seminar

Teaching for Uncertainty
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
ICC Auditorium
Provost's Seminar on Teaching and Learning

When educators in the professions describe their educational mission, it is often couched in terms like "learning to think like a lawyer" or like a physician or an engineer. Underlying these conceptions of "professional learning" is a process in which the novice professionals learn to make judgments and decisions under conditions that are inherently uncertain. Over the past ten years, scholars at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have been studying the professional preparation of lawyers, clergy (priests, ministers and rabbis), nurses, engineers, physicians and teachers. We have concurrently been investigating the character of teaching in PhD programs ranging from neurosciences to mathematics and from history to English.

We have begun to identify the "signature pedagogies" of each of these fields, and to locate both distinctive practices within fields and common features across them. One of the common features of these approaches to teaching is their emphasis on preparing future practitioners, whether of professions or of scholarship, to make judgments and decisions under uncertainty. How can we best discuss these pedagogies of uncertainty and their efficacy?

Category:

Education

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• education
• cndls
• georgetown
• innovation
• provost