Prof Lee Shulman

Biography

Lee Shulman received the BA, MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He served as a professor of educational psychology and medical education at Michigan State University from 1963 to 1982, where he founded and co-directed the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT) and co-directed a 10-year program of research on medical thinking and decision making that led to publication of the classic Medical Problem Solving (Elstein, Shulman and Sprafka, 1978) by the Harvard University Press. In 1982, Prof Shulman moved to Stanford University's School of Education, where he was the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and Professor (by courtesy) of Psychology. In 1997, he was appointed President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and served as its eighth president until 2008.

Currently he holds the position of the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University and President Emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation. Prof Shulman holds all his academic degrees from the University of Chicago. He is a past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and received its career award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research. He is also a past president of the National Academy of Education. He is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's 1995 E.L. Thorndike Award for Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education, a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been awarded 17 honorary doctoral degrees.

Prof Shulman's research investigates teaching and teacher education at all levels from the elementary school to the PhD, medical education, assessment, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and signature pedagogies in the professions. Among other works, his publications include the following books: Medical Problem Solving (1978), The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning and Learning to Teach (2004), Teaching as Community Property: Essays on Higher Education (2004) and Paradigms and Programs for Research on Teaching (1990).

His Stanford University research team developed the portfolio-based performance assessment prototypes for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards between 1985 and 1990. Shulman received the 2006 Grawemeyer Award in Education for his book The Wisdom of Practice.