Starting at the End and Mapping Backwards to a Signature Pedagogy, videoconference by Lee Shulman

There needs to be a congruence of teaching from class-to-class – students should not have to adapt to different teaching styles when moving from rotation to rotation in their course of study; this is the case in medical schools or law schools.

Moving from program to program, there are similarities from university to university in professional programs – fields have developed standard patterns of teaching – signature pedagogies are connected to implicit theories in-field of what it means to be a professional in the field:

What does it mean to think like a lawyer? Or a doctor?

• In many cases – by tradition, a systematic pedagogy developed over generations of teaching tradition; what really mattered to faculty and the profession was reflected in the teaching. Pedagogical convergence – people in a field who are trained in various places share a common lexicon – these individuals are more and more capable of learning from one another and creating a cohesive professional community.
• We don’t need to create programs in lock-step.
• There is a high level of similarity among the challenges of instructional leadership and supervision; education leadership and teacher education – how do you look at the issues in both areas of teaching and learning quality in and out of the classroom – these pedagogies can be shared.
• Signature pedagogies have to be pervasive and persistent – though students often feel that they are moving from class to class through unrelated events – and the rules of engagement within the classroom should be reasonably similar.
• Signature Pedagogy Evaluation framework:
• What does it mean to think like a lawyer, nurse, rabbi, doctor?
• What are the program goals and what pedagogies best help us to achieve those goals?
• What are students’ habits of mind?
• What are the core texts of the field?
• What are the things that mature professionals in field encounter as literal texts: reports, behavioral texts, evaluations, reviews.
• What kind of interpretative, critical reading of texts do they need to do? Each discipline has different levels of text-dependence (law, clergy, not so much nursing).
• What type of reading analysis do they need?
• What kind of reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making do they do and how can they get practice in doing so? What types of dilemmas do they face that require specific skill-sets that need to be taught?
• What needs to be taught face-to-face? What can be taught through peer collaboration delivered via technology?
• What are the roles that professionals play in their respective fields?
• What does it mean to perform as a member of the profession? What does it mean to do the work?
• The goal of these professions is not just to write about concepts and processes, but to connect thought to action.
• Students need practice in identifying the consequences of actions, evaluating them, and thinking about how to approach them in a different and revised way in the future.
• We cannot limit ourselves to the status quo of the field. We have to look to the horizon to see impending change or need for it.
• We have to teach anticipation and prediction of future needs, just as much as we have to provide a normative element that states what these professionals ought to be doing.
• What are the moral and ethical challenges of the profession? How is the individual called upon to be a moral agent; sometimes standing in opposition to other stakeholders within the setting?
• How do we build the moral element into our pedagogy? We cannot just provide a course on ethics as in law school, but need to build in a concern for and with moral and ethical demands of the profession into every course and laboratory of practice.
• What loses professionals the trust of those around them and often their jobs are errors of moral judgment – such concepts have to be central to our pedagogy; professionals cannot merely be concerned with “not getting caught.”
• Professionals should learn to consider: is this right? Fair? Congruent with conceptions of social justice, equity?
• We should not be so busy doing something as to not consider whether or not we should be doing it in the first place.
• In the same study, we should evaluate what it is to think like, act like, and consider the moral implications of a particular professional.
• Propose action, consider the consequences, and look to the moral elements involved in the process.
• Case-based, problem-based pedagogy is often the signature.
• Students who are in the filed while they are learning provide an interesting hybrid between literature-based case classics (the curricular matter of instruction) and cases that are brought by the students from the field to the table for discussion. These can be powerful tools. The use of field-based cases is a powerful way for signature pedagogies to make connections between the classroom and the field. These different types of learning experiences should be connected and not placed in separate worlds.
• The fact that students are not full-time can be a great asset – these are their clinical lab experiences – take what they encounter in-field and bring it to the classroom for collaborative analysis – then recommendations are brought back to the field for further field-testing.
• Some form of rotation is necessary: a challenge in our professional practice degree, as our students are already in-field, but limited to a particular setting. There must be a self-conscious attempt to rotate them across different practice settings to ensure variation and help them understand that, as contexts change, different approaches are necessary.
• There is no necessary expectation that signature pedagogies remain the same in every phase of the program, but we can think in those terms:
• If we have a performative sense of what students should be experiencing through there years of learning, then the orientation experience should be able to prefigure the capstone experience:
• To what extent are the students introduced to program challenges right at the beginning as an anticipatory experience?
• They should grapple early with the prototypes of the challenges that they will be facing throughout their preparatory experience.
• The core of the program, the laboratories of practice: are the students continuously getting the chance to practice and reflect on ways of thinking, acting, and being. How can we embed formal and informal assessments of these experiences?
• Every student should begin to develop a design portfolio in their first week of the architecture program (Boyer); our students should develop and maintain an electronic portfolio throughout their program (like in teacher education programs).
• Structured portfolios are ways of capturing what students are confronting, learning, and evaluating – they are used for reflection, communication with peers and with faculty.
• What are the materials of learning that students can share in the same way that faculty share materials of teaching among themselves?
• Students need the ability to provide feedback on teaching and learning by critiquing the rubrics of delivery and display.
• Students can draw from portfolios to share learning strategies, just as faculty can share pedagogies from teaching portfolios.
• We should exchange cases, videograms, problems, challenges, and techniques as faculty.

The part-time faculty issue:

• Originally faculty met briefly, shared general teaching principles and direction, and then operated as independent contractors.
• There was not much time spent coordinating or integrating teaching approaches – this leads to redundancy and fragmentation.
• We need to derive power in teaching through consistency and connectedness.

Our programs have to be designed by faculty that maintain contact with students for the sake of continuity and congruence throughout the program duration:

• Necessitates faculty coordination.
• Leaders have to obtain collegial buy-in.
• What type of faculty development is necessary to move us from rhetoric to action with regard to professional practice pedagogies?
• Faculty have to commit to learn to teach in new ways; evaluate and critique; support these new ways.
• If this is a challenge for full-time faculty, then the challenge is even greater for part-time faculty.

Comments Session:

• We must create signature pedagogies with enough variation among our settings so that we can share innovations that may inform new development.
• Signature pedagogies should not be isolated only in one course or to one faculty member – vehicles for sharing these across departments and departmental curricula are necessary. This must be thought out collectively and intentionally. Change and innovation should occur developmentally over time.
• Some programs are deep in consideration of the capstone experience or signature performance that captures the essence of what it means to be a professional in our field. Thinking of this first helps us to map backward to what it takes to come to this culminative experience. Or we can socialize a community of students from the outset. Or we can consider implementing the educational professional equivalent of a field station or laboratory that sits between the field and the academy. These are all different starting points that infuse variation within the process.
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of our faculty? The interests of our students? – this will inform our program development and what particular pedagogies best apply. The way the instructional package comes together (the values, priorities, socialist positions) can be very different. There are differences, but a core way of thinking may be shared among programs.
• Is there a way to mitigate the variation and overlap between professional certification programs and our graduate programs? What if board certification or licensure, for example, was a prerequisite to the professional degree? Is this up to the states and the institutions within? Perhaps this move would characterize the program in a more cohesive way and cut down the sizes of our classes – but perhaps more board certified teachers would then come to our programs?

Summary of Mapping Back to Signature Pedagogies by David Imig

Small group discussion:
There are 3 identifiable characteristics of signature pedagogies discussed by Lee Shulman:
1) Implementing case-based/problem-based learning in classes.
2) Combine field learning (labs of practice) with class learning.
3) Encourage collaboration among faculty members

• Should use these to move this initiative along.
• There are also 3 pillars discussed by Lee Shulman, such as “deep levels” (i.e., emerging possibilities) that should be considered.
• An example of this is video texts which evolved into “Video Quest”
• There is a need for detailed rubrics that are implemented into all universities.
• Is the question “here is the signature pedagogy” or “what is the signature pedagogy?”
• There needs to be collaboration and consensus to push initiative forward.
• Why do we need a signature pedagogy?

• Should understand its importance before implementing it.
• Need to be able to communicate its importance to faculty.
• Need to understand implementation and operational barriers.
• There is no shared vision among students since faculty is not implementing a signature pedagogy.
• Need to ask the question what does it mean to be a ___ and act as a ___?
• Assessment is part of the teaching process (it is embedded within).
• Need to ask “how does assessment contribute to the signature pedagogies that we adopt?”

• Universities have different perspectives of teaching and learning, therefore, the assessments will be different.
• A possible claim is that “there is a signature pedagogy in education (characteristics discussed by Shulman) and it should be implemented.”
• Evidence is Vanderbilt’s design.
• We need to take ownership of what characteristics we believe are part of signature pedagogy and implement them.
• This is going to take a long time, so we need to get started ASAP.

Large group discussion:
What did we learn?

• We need to align with signature pedagogies within institutions.
• Assessment is key to signature pedagogies.
• Need to determine learning opportunities and determine how we will assess learning.
• Need to alleviate jargon from our discussion of signature pedagogies.
• Language and communication are key to pushing this forward.
• Need a rubric of outcomes.
• A signature pedagogy may not appear.
• Need models that can be transferable and modifiable within institutions, then adopt them.
• Need rubrics that accompany these models.
• Are pedagogies incongruent with the standards we want to teach?

• Are we revising and recreating signature pedagogies rather than developing them?

How do we use these signature pedagogies?

• We need to define core activities of signature pedagogies.
• Such as, habits of mind and heart.
• Inquiry is a pedagogy.
• Learning inquiry naturally even when don’t teach it (UConn example).
• The “seeds” for a signature pedagogy are there, but need to be identified and tested.
• Need to assess old paradigm and figure out why it is inadequate.
• Don’t abandon the old, but revise it to enhance practice through inquiry.
• Need to evaluate needs of students to determine signature pedagogy.
• Faculty needs to share pedagogies.
• Professional development is key to consistency and congruence.
• Institutions need to make lists of what teaching issues should be addressed.

Building Institutional “Buy-In” – Camilla Benbow, Dean of Peabody College

Camilla Benbow, dean of the Peabody College of Education, gave the final presentation at the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate convened in Nashville at Vanderbilt. Her topic was institutional ‘buy-in’ to the changes this project is proposing for the educational doctorate. She specifically emphasized three areas of potential influence to promote the new education doctorate.

First, provide a clear vision of the purpose and intent of the doctorate in education. Much of the discussion revolves around reorganization the Ph.D. in education as well as the Ed.D. What is the purpose and differences between a research doctorate and a practitioner doctorate? Institutions need a thorough separation of the two degrees and treat them as distinct and unique.

Second, the dean of your college of education must be on board with the proposed changes. The Ed. D. should blend applied research with real-world situations. The degree has practical implications and should be rigorous with a specialized focus for practitioners in education. The Capstone should be a Capstone, not a watered down dissertation. We must make the Capstone a meaningful, practical experience based upon research methodology and techniques. The Capstone should fit the student’s administrative interest and take advantage of the team orientation.

Third, the education doctorate and the Capstone should be viewed as an opportunity to build and provide for highly trained educators to better their institutions, not a problem waiting to be solved. The education doctorate offers opportunity of outcomes with new innovations in modeling and learning. This new, improved education doctorate can be a national inspiration and motivation to rethink education across the disciplines.

Finally, she stressed the need for ethical and moral leadership based upon social justice and equity. The challenges in education are real and formidable, but a new invigorated education doctorate can prepare and give vision to a new generation of educational leaders to forge new alliances and new methodology. Camilla showed the passion and understanding of the need to improve the education doctorate and the Carnegie Project is making great strides in achieving that goal.

Summaries by Graduate Students: Syraj Syed, University of Florida; Jothany Blackwood, California State University; Jessica Bleil, Duquesne University; Christopher Phillips, University of Kentucky-Lexington

• Day One Summary
• Day Two Summary