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The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach
What do teachers need to know in order to teach well? How important is the depth and quality of teachers' content knowledge as a critical aspect of their ability to teach? How can teachers best be educated, and how can we assess their accomplishments as teachers? In what ways is the professional preparation of teachers comparable to the preparation of physicians and other members of learned professions? What kinds of educational research can provide deeper understanding of teaching, learning, and the reform of education? These are just some of the many questions answered in this landmark collection of Lee Shulman's best work. A pioneer in the field of teaching and teacher research, Shulman's work and thinking have long influenced teachers and researchers. But while Shulman is one of the most widely cited scholars in education, his writings have been scattered among a variety of books and journals—until now. The Wisdom of Practice at last makes Shulman's major works on K-12 education and teacher education available in one volume. His interests in teaching of all sorts—in K-12 schools, in teacher education, in graduate programs for educational researchers, in liberal education—have been diverse. The essays included touch on such wide-ranging topics as the psychology of school subjects, medical problem solving, teacher knowledge, performance assessment, teaching in higher education, the scholarship of teaching and learning, the characteristics and pedagogies of the professions, the role of cases in professional education and research, and the character of relevant and rigorous educational research.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2004
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August 31, 2025
One of the things I like about collections of essays is that you get to see the jokes that the writer particularly likes. They would probably not normally use the same joke twice in a single book – but the essays weren’t originally written to be read together – and so, repeating jokes doesn’t seem like a problem. Not that 'jokes' is quite the right word - for example, he says twice that saying a little girl with a red hood walking into the forest to go to grandmother's house isn't a story - but becomes a story once she meets the wolf - the complication. He uses this to discuss why 'cases' can't be about everything going to plan. I got this book at work when an academic left the university I work in. Often, when an academic leaves, they put their books out for people to scavenge. I didn’t know anything about this author, but I liked the title. I really enjoyed this book. A couple of the main ideas he discusses in this are pedagogical content knowledge, portfolios and case studies. That’s pretty much all that this review is going to look at.
One of the things I definitely didn’t know was that the word ‘case’ is from the Latin for ‘fall’. That is, that a case is really about a situation where something has gone wrong, or at least, not to plan. The author makes a lot of this. He thinks teachers – both when they are starting out and in their ongoing professional learning – should develop case studies. The point of these is to provide exemplars of their practice, but not just in the case of ‘I planned this, it went perfectly, look at how clever I am’, but rather to show how a particular example of practice tested the ideas the practitioner in their practice. He makes the point that you only learn from something once you have reflected upon it, but also that in our busy lives, we too rarely have the luxury of that kind of reflection. The next thing is always urgent and so learning from the exceptional case can feel like too much like hard work.
At one point he says that when they watched doctors diagnosing patients they had thought that it would follow the standard sort of myth about how they go about this. You know, they gather evidence, consider the implications of the evidence they have gathered and then use that evidence to form their diagnosis. Except, this wasn’t what they found. The doctors would form hypotheses almost immediately – and not one hypothesis, but a range of likely ones. Then as the evidence started to mount up they would reject some and fortify others. He says this is actually the logical thing to do – since humans are narrative driven, and holding unconnected facts in our heads is really hard to do. So, we come up with a group of plausible hypotheses and see how the facts of the case stack up against each hypothesis. This gives a series of storylines that the facts can hook onto and that helps keep the various facts in mind. This is a bit of a theme in the book too. We are told there is a right way to do something, but this proves to be not at all the way the experts in the field do it. Rather, how the experts do it isn’t them just being annoying or lazy, but rather they do it that way because it is the easiest way to hold everything together.
This is similar to something else he talks about with teachers. Research showed a while ago that the longer you wait between asking a question and expecting a reply, the better the likely answers you are going to get. The problem was that when they would encourage teachers to do this, they really did increase their waiting time after asking a question – at least, in training situations. What they found was that when teachers got back into their classrooms, they often reverted to having very short wait times again. As he explains, the normal response to this is to say something like, ‘bloody teachers – don’t they pay attention to what we tell them?’ But he says it is much more interesting than this. There are multiple reasons why teachers don’t keep this up. One is that it obviously doesn’t apply to all questions. As he says at one point, if I ask you your phone number, I’m not going to get a better response if I give you longer thinking time. This might seem trivial, but too many questions are asked in classrooms which are a bit like asking a phone number. Another problem is that silence is a threatening thing – and it takes courage to allow it to stretch. And while you are often told that ‘nature loathes a vacuum’ and that someone will fill the silence – this hasn’t always been my experience while teaching myself. Sometimes an extended silence after asking a question can become a kind of permission for people not to answer at all. Silence is better than feeling stupid. Another reason is that teachers don’t always teach subjects they deeply know – and so allowing too much thinking time might throw up further questions the teacher doesn’t know how to answer – or even take the lesson off in directions that the teacher hadn’t anticipated.
Which brings us to the problem of pedagogical content knowledge. There is a general assumption about teaching that all you really need to know to be able to teach is content knowledge. If you know how to do long division, you should be able to teach it. Then there is what is known as pedagogy – essentially a theory of how people learn and so how you should go about teaching them. What the author also discovered was that there is a third kind of skill that good teachers have – pedagogical content knowledge. Not only do they know what they are teaching, but they also know the kinds of mistakes that learners are likely to make while they are trying to learn something and so they will have a number of ways to teach the same material so that it becomes clear to a range of different learners. This is much harder to acquire than just content knowledge – how to do something – and is the creative part of teaching in many ways. And it comes with experience – it is hard to teach this to a teacher – just as other forms of creativity are hard to teach.
This is where case studies come into their own again. It is not that they necessarily teach pedagogical content knowledge, but they do provide examples of where things haven’t gone to plan – some fall happened during a lesson – and the teacher reflects on how they might avoid that same fall the next time they teach the lesson. The author was a promoter of portfolios for early career teachers. The idea being that they should build a series of case studies that show how they have progressed as a teacher. These are used in Victoria, where I live, both as a final assessment when graduating from an initial teacher education course and also to progress from being a graduate teacher after the first couple of years in the profession. It is interesting that when he was promoting these other academics complained that portfolios were likely to involve ‘cheating’. That is, that the people putting together the portfolios could get help from other teachers and this couldn’t be checked to ensure it didn’t happen and they felt it undermined the value of the exercise. His point was that he actually hoped this would be the case. That teaching ought to be a more collaborative exercise than it often is allowed to be and so allowing some sort of mentoring in discussing cases is a good thing. The point is in the reflection – and doing that with a mentor, a more experienced person, isn’t cheating, but exactly what a professional ought to do.
There’s a lot more to this book than I’ve covered in this review. I want to end with an example he gives at one point of a teacher teaching. They had finished a unit on odd numbers and the teacher asked the class some questions about them. One of the students said something she really wasn’t expecting – he said that he felt that the number 6 was both even and odd. The authors main theme throughout this book, in many ways, is that a teacher’s main role in life is to find out why someone has a misunderstanding – not to just ‘correct’ them. And so, she asked the student why he thought that. He said that 6 is even because it can be divided by 2, but then you get three groups of twos – and this is odd. So, 6 is both odd and even at the same time. Other kids in the class said the same is true of 10 and so on. What had initially seemed like a stupid thing to say, suddenly showed a deeper level of understanding – even if this was still a misunderstanding. The point being, that people don’t make mistakes for the fun of it – getting to the heart of why they are making those mistakes is a key part of helping them to learn.
One of the things I definitely didn’t know was that the word ‘case’ is from the Latin for ‘fall’. That is, that a case is really about a situation where something has gone wrong, or at least, not to plan. The author makes a lot of this. He thinks teachers – both when they are starting out and in their ongoing professional learning – should develop case studies. The point of these is to provide exemplars of their practice, but not just in the case of ‘I planned this, it went perfectly, look at how clever I am’, but rather to show how a particular example of practice tested the ideas the practitioner in their practice. He makes the point that you only learn from something once you have reflected upon it, but also that in our busy lives, we too rarely have the luxury of that kind of reflection. The next thing is always urgent and so learning from the exceptional case can feel like too much like hard work.
At one point he says that when they watched doctors diagnosing patients they had thought that it would follow the standard sort of myth about how they go about this. You know, they gather evidence, consider the implications of the evidence they have gathered and then use that evidence to form their diagnosis. Except, this wasn’t what they found. The doctors would form hypotheses almost immediately – and not one hypothesis, but a range of likely ones. Then as the evidence started to mount up they would reject some and fortify others. He says this is actually the logical thing to do – since humans are narrative driven, and holding unconnected facts in our heads is really hard to do. So, we come up with a group of plausible hypotheses and see how the facts of the case stack up against each hypothesis. This gives a series of storylines that the facts can hook onto and that helps keep the various facts in mind. This is a bit of a theme in the book too. We are told there is a right way to do something, but this proves to be not at all the way the experts in the field do it. Rather, how the experts do it isn’t them just being annoying or lazy, but rather they do it that way because it is the easiest way to hold everything together.
This is similar to something else he talks about with teachers. Research showed a while ago that the longer you wait between asking a question and expecting a reply, the better the likely answers you are going to get. The problem was that when they would encourage teachers to do this, they really did increase their waiting time after asking a question – at least, in training situations. What they found was that when teachers got back into their classrooms, they often reverted to having very short wait times again. As he explains, the normal response to this is to say something like, ‘bloody teachers – don’t they pay attention to what we tell them?’ But he says it is much more interesting than this. There are multiple reasons why teachers don’t keep this up. One is that it obviously doesn’t apply to all questions. As he says at one point, if I ask you your phone number, I’m not going to get a better response if I give you longer thinking time. This might seem trivial, but too many questions are asked in classrooms which are a bit like asking a phone number. Another problem is that silence is a threatening thing – and it takes courage to allow it to stretch. And while you are often told that ‘nature loathes a vacuum’ and that someone will fill the silence – this hasn’t always been my experience while teaching myself. Sometimes an extended silence after asking a question can become a kind of permission for people not to answer at all. Silence is better than feeling stupid. Another reason is that teachers don’t always teach subjects they deeply know – and so allowing too much thinking time might throw up further questions the teacher doesn’t know how to answer – or even take the lesson off in directions that the teacher hadn’t anticipated.
Which brings us to the problem of pedagogical content knowledge. There is a general assumption about teaching that all you really need to know to be able to teach is content knowledge. If you know how to do long division, you should be able to teach it. Then there is what is known as pedagogy – essentially a theory of how people learn and so how you should go about teaching them. What the author also discovered was that there is a third kind of skill that good teachers have – pedagogical content knowledge. Not only do they know what they are teaching, but they also know the kinds of mistakes that learners are likely to make while they are trying to learn something and so they will have a number of ways to teach the same material so that it becomes clear to a range of different learners. This is much harder to acquire than just content knowledge – how to do something – and is the creative part of teaching in many ways. And it comes with experience – it is hard to teach this to a teacher – just as other forms of creativity are hard to teach.
This is where case studies come into their own again. It is not that they necessarily teach pedagogical content knowledge, but they do provide examples of where things haven’t gone to plan – some fall happened during a lesson – and the teacher reflects on how they might avoid that same fall the next time they teach the lesson. The author was a promoter of portfolios for early career teachers. The idea being that they should build a series of case studies that show how they have progressed as a teacher. These are used in Victoria, where I live, both as a final assessment when graduating from an initial teacher education course and also to progress from being a graduate teacher after the first couple of years in the profession. It is interesting that when he was promoting these other academics complained that portfolios were likely to involve ‘cheating’. That is, that the people putting together the portfolios could get help from other teachers and this couldn’t be checked to ensure it didn’t happen and they felt it undermined the value of the exercise. His point was that he actually hoped this would be the case. That teaching ought to be a more collaborative exercise than it often is allowed to be and so allowing some sort of mentoring in discussing cases is a good thing. The point is in the reflection – and doing that with a mentor, a more experienced person, isn’t cheating, but exactly what a professional ought to do.
There’s a lot more to this book than I’ve covered in this review. I want to end with an example he gives at one point of a teacher teaching. They had finished a unit on odd numbers and the teacher asked the class some questions about them. One of the students said something she really wasn’t expecting – he said that he felt that the number 6 was both even and odd. The authors main theme throughout this book, in many ways, is that a teacher’s main role in life is to find out why someone has a misunderstanding – not to just ‘correct’ them. And so, she asked the student why he thought that. He said that 6 is even because it can be divided by 2, but then you get three groups of twos – and this is odd. So, 6 is both odd and even at the same time. Other kids in the class said the same is true of 10 and so on. What had initially seemed like a stupid thing to say, suddenly showed a deeper level of understanding – even if this was still a misunderstanding. The point being, that people don’t make mistakes for the fun of it – getting to the heart of why they are making those mistakes is a key part of helping them to learn.
September 5, 2022
兜兜转转，又回到Shulman，看到老师写的序，还是很感慨的，他提供了一个很好的样板，告诉我们对于实践知识的理论化还有多少工作要做。
May 7, 2016
Shulman's book, The Wisdom of Practice, with a foreword by his disciple Susanne Wilson, is a collection of the most important essays and papers that he published across his academic career. Among all the essays included in this book, the most important and widely cited one might be Those Who Understand which focuses on teachers' practical knowledge. I love this book; especially I love his writing style, the classic writing style characteristic of varying words, vivid description, and smooth flow. Meanwhile, this book consists of the elaboration of quite a few important concepts that he proposed, such as Teacher's Practical Knowledge and Portfolio, which exert conspicuous influence on the research and practice of teacher education. As a leading researcher in the area of teacher education, I do not think anybody today can match his contribution and achievement. This book is a must for graduate students and researchers of teacher preparation.
I only gave this book a three-star rating, however. This does not mean that his book is not good. Seen within the academy of education in general and teacher education in particular, this book is quite good. However, comparatively speaking, this book is mediocre. To have a deep understanding about my meaning, let's make a comparison between this book and Dan Lortie's Schoolteacher (1975). In general, this book by Shulman is centered on teacher preparation and the teaching profession. Does Lortie's as well. Shulman's observation and understanding about teaching and teacher preparation is confined within the very area of teachers. He barely went beyond this isolated circle. I mean he did not discuss much the social factors that influence teachers and teacher preparation. It is understandable for Shulman did in this way because his major is teacher education rather than sociology of education. However, due to this weakness, all his initiatives of improving teacher preparation are incomplete, ineffective, and even helpless to some extent. To improve teachers' quality, he proposed the concept of practical knowledge which can help teachers effectively convey the knowledge that they have to their students. To prepare qualified teachers, he put forward a brilliant idea of portfolio which is a comprehensive indication of a certain teacher's abilities such as knowledge, teaching skills, and dispositions. However, these ideas cannot help the poor quality of teachers resulting from the low bar of admission of teacher candidates, comparatively short preparation, bad teacher educators, the ambiguity of education objectives, and people's unrealistic expectations on teachers. Although theorists like Lee Shulman and researchers have tried their best to improve teacher preparation, we did not see any visible change. All the foregoing questions have been thorough examined and discussed by Lortie in his classic book.
In short, this book, a collection of his essays and papers, is good. But it is not an effective cure for the disease of teacher preparation.
I only gave this book a three-star rating, however. This does not mean that his book is not good. Seen within the academy of education in general and teacher education in particular, this book is quite good. However, comparatively speaking, this book is mediocre. To have a deep understanding about my meaning, let's make a comparison between this book and Dan Lortie's Schoolteacher (1975). In general, this book by Shulman is centered on teacher preparation and the teaching profession. Does Lortie's as well. Shulman's observation and understanding about teaching and teacher preparation is confined within the very area of teachers. He barely went beyond this isolated circle. I mean he did not discuss much the social factors that influence teachers and teacher preparation. It is understandable for Shulman did in this way because his major is teacher education rather than sociology of education. However, due to this weakness, all his initiatives of improving teacher preparation are incomplete, ineffective, and even helpless to some extent. To improve teachers' quality, he proposed the concept of practical knowledge which can help teachers effectively convey the knowledge that they have to their students. To prepare qualified teachers, he put forward a brilliant idea of portfolio which is a comprehensive indication of a certain teacher's abilities such as knowledge, teaching skills, and dispositions. However, these ideas cannot help the poor quality of teachers resulting from the low bar of admission of teacher candidates, comparatively short preparation, bad teacher educators, the ambiguity of education objectives, and people's unrealistic expectations on teachers. Although theorists like Lee Shulman and researchers have tried their best to improve teacher preparation, we did not see any visible change. All the foregoing questions have been thorough examined and discussed by Lortie in his classic book.
In short, this book, a collection of his essays and papers, is good. But it is not an effective cure for the disease of teacher preparation.
Want to read
November 29, 2011I've just ordered it, and I'm eagerly awaiting its arrival. I've been a "fan" of Lee Shulman and his work for quite some time, but most of what I've read have been articles. And after awhile, those dog-eared photocopies get too dog-eared even for my tastes. So now I'll have a real book of his. He's one of the wisest (no pun intended regarding his title) people writing about education.
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