EdSight

Lee S. Shulman was born in 1938 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Jewish immigrant parents who operated a family delicatessen — an early and informal school in social navigation, customer relations, and the interpretation of human character. He attended an Orthodox Jewish day school in which Talmudic study in the mornings was paired with secular subjects in the afternoons, an experience that cultivated both the habits of close textual analysis and the conviction that learning and community are inseparable. He entered the Hutchins College of the University of Chicago on a full scholarship, where the small seminar classes and collegial intellectual atmosphere shaped his most durable convictions about what good teaching looks like and what scholarship requires. He advanced to the university's doctoral programme in educational psychology under the mentorship of Benjamin Bloom — best known for his taxonomy of educational objectives — and Joseph Schwab, the distinguished science educator and curriculum theorist who introduced Shulman to the idea that each academic discipline possesses its own characteristic structures, concepts, and ways of validating claims. After completing his doctorate, Shulman joined the faculty of Michigan State University, where he was subsequently invited into the new medical school to study clinical diagnostic reasoning; his investigation there of how physicians identify and solve problems led to the discovery that knowledge is domain-specific rather than generalisable across fields — a finding with profound implications for teacher education. He later moved to Stanford University, where he became the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, and from 1997 to 2008 he served as president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is currently professor emeritus at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. His wife, Judy Shulman — who devoted her own career to the challenges of educating and sustaining novice and veteran teachers — was his lifelong personal and professional partner until her death in 2021.

Shulman's single most influential contribution to educational theory is the concept he coined in 1986: pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The concept was, in part, a direct riposte to George Bernard Shaw's dismissive aphorism “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches” — Shulman's reply being “Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.” PCK names the distinctive form of professional knowledge that great teachers possess but that content experts alone do not: it is the capacity not merely to understand a subject deeply but to know how to represent and communicate it so that learners of different ages, backgrounds, and prior knowledge can grasp it. In Shulman's definition, PCK includes “the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations — in a word, the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others.” It requires knowing the most common misconceptions students bring to a subject and how to address them; knowing which topics are intrinsically difficult and which approaches work best for particular learners; and knowing how to adjust both content and method to the actual understanding of the particular class. The concept has been taken up in virtually every teaching field — science, mathematics, law, engineering, medicine, theology — and Shulman himself described feeling like “the biological father to this child that was then raised by many, intelligent foster parents.” Critics have noted that PCK can be “fuzzy” and difficult to operationalise in concrete instructional terms, and that there is no universally accepted definition; but the concept's productive framing of teacher knowledge as irreducibly different from either content knowledge or generic pedagogical skill has permanently reshaped the theoretical landscape of teacher education.

The intellectual origins of PCK lie in Shulman's early engagement with Schwab's conception of the structures of academic disciplines. Schwab had argued that each discipline possesses not merely a body of knowledge but a characteristic set of concepts, tools, and modes of inquiry through which it generates and validates claims. Shulman carried this insight into his medical school research at Michigan State, where he and colleagues discovered that expert physicians' diagnostic reasoning was not the application of a general problem-solving algorithm but the expression of deeply organised, domain-specific knowledge: experienced clinicians recognised patterns in clinical presentations by comparing them against a rich internal library of cases, rather than by working through a generic sequence of inferential steps. This finding — that expertise is fundamentally domain-specific rather than generalisable — became a cornerstone of Shulman's approach to teacher knowledge, reinforcing the argument that teachers need rich, structured knowledge of their specific subject matter, not merely general teaching skills, and that subject-matter preparation and pedagogical preparation must be genuinely integrated in teacher education programmes.

During his presidency of the Carnegie Foundation (1997–2008), Shulman extended his analysis beyond school teaching to explore how preparation for professional practice is organised across a wide range of fields — law, medicine, nursing, engineering, the clergy, and teaching itself. He developed the concept of “signature pedagogies”: the characteristic forms of teaching and learning that define how a profession's future practitioners are formed. Signature pedagogies are pervasive in that they “implicitly define what counts as knowledge in a field and how things become known”; they define the location of authority, the norms of performance, and the standards of professional judgement. The law school's case-based Socratic dialogue, the medical school's clinical rounds and bedside teaching, the theological seminary's homiletical practice — each is a signature pedagogy that shapes not only how professionals reason but who they become. The concept gave educators and reformers a systematic vocabulary for analysing the habitual patterns of professional preparation, identifying where those habits served learning well and where they needed to be redesigned. It also reinforced Shulman's central claim that teaching is always already a form of professional practice, not merely a set of techniques, and that the formation of teachers requires the same serious attention to the relationship between knowledge, skill, and judgement that the formation of physicians and lawyers receives.

One of Shulman's most sustained campaigns was for the recognition of teaching as a legitimate and valued form of scholarly activity, not a secondary obligation performed “on the side” by people whose real work was research. He argued that teaching draws on the fruits of scholarship in that it requires continuous transformation of existing knowledge into new representations capable of supporting student understanding, and that this process of transformation is itself a form of intellectual work that should be made visible, subjected to peer critique, and recognised within academic culture. His concept of the “scholarship of teaching and learning” — developed through the Carnegie Foundation's initiatives and widely taken up in higher education — reframed teaching as community property: something that should be made public, shared among colleagues, and continuously improved through a culture of inquiry and peer review, rather than conducted in isolation behind closed classroom doors. Shulman argued for a five-element model of teaching as an extended intellectual process — vision, design, interactions, outcomes, and analysis — that situated any given lesson or course within a larger arc of scholarly planning, execution, and reflection.

Shulman's work on the nature of teacher knowledge and the evaluation of teacher performance was directly instrumental in the creation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), founded in 1987 following a Carnegie Forum task force. Working with colleagues, Shulman developed a portfolio-based system of performance assessment for teachers that drew on Bloom's insight that any student can master material if given enough time and appropriately structured support — and that evaluation should therefore be flexible in method and timing while holding goals constant. The NBPTS defines what teachers should know and be able to do through five core propositions and certifies teachers through a rigorous voluntary process that has, to date, certified over 130,000 teachers in North America. The organisation represents the most sustained institutional realisation of Shulman's conviction that teaching must be undergirded with robust scholarly research if it is to be recognised as a genuine profession with accountable standards of knowledge and practice.

Shulman's legacy is both conceptual and institutional. PCK remains one of the most cited and debated frameworks in the literature on teacher knowledge, and its influence on the design of teacher education programmes — in their emphasis on the integration of subject-matter and pedagogical preparation — has been enormous and global. The NBPTS continues to operate as the institutional expression of his argument for teaching as a valued profession. His work at the Carnegie Foundation on the scholarship of teaching and learning helped create a new culture of inquiry in higher education that has outlasted his presidency. The unfinished business in his framework is significant, however. Critics have noted that his work says relatively little about multicultural education, equity, and the structural conditions — race, class, language background — that shape which students receive high-quality teaching and which do not; a brief mention of “justice, equity, and fairness” as components of teacher knowledge in his 1986 paper was never developed into a sustained analysis. The question of what PCK looks like in contexts of deep cultural and linguistic diversity, and how teacher knowledge frameworks can be responsive to structural inequality rather than simply to disciplinary content, remains among the most productive and least resolved dimensions of his legacy.

• Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14.
• Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–22.
• Shulman, L. S. (1993). Teaching as community property: Putting an end to pedagogical solitude. Change, 25(6), 1–3.
• Shulman, L. S. (2004a). Teaching as Community Property: Essays on Higher Education. Jossey-Bass.
• Shulman, L. S. (2004b). The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach. Jossey-Bass.
• Shulman, L. S. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52–59.