• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

The Language of Teaching

First, there must be a common language for all discussions of teaching. While Hutchings and Shulman are right to distinguish excellent teaching from the scholarship of teaching, the language of teaching quality and the language of scholarship must be internally coherent. How you assess excellence in teaching, in other words, should not be conducted in a different language from that used by scholars of teaching. If students are to contribute to that assessment, they too must share that language, with major implications for contemporary practice. The context is one of partnership and collaboration, not suspicion and distrust.

Second, the language will become further complicated by being different in respect of different disciplines. One of the most depressing features of the system of student evaluation is its systemic inability to distinguish in any depth between disciplines, fields of study or areas of interest in respect of the ways in which they are taught. Although Shulman writes about such general skills as synthesis, application, and analysis, he recognizes that these terms must mean different things in different disciplines, with major influences on the teaching that follows.

For example, the language will be different in discussing the teaching of science and the teaching of history because the content is different. If a historian "analyzes" the causes of the American Revolution, he or she will not in any respect be doing the same thing as the chemist called to "analyze" the constituents of a plastic bomb. The scholar "analyzing" Mansfield Park is doing something methodologically different from the psychologist "analyzing" data on recidivism in juveniles. The content, in brief, leads to dramatically different "mental skills." Content also shapes teaching and the learning activities a teacher designs to embody the discipline's methodology.

Finally, in his rejection of behaviorism and his embrace of a constructivist view of learning, Shulman is embracing this epistemological complexity and how it plays out in different disciplines. That complexity will constantly show up in any cogent pedagogy or pattern of teaching, and thereby in any respected system of assessment. The common language must celebrate such differences, not attempt to override them for bureaucratic ends. Not only must there be a common and increasingly complex language shared, but institutional assessment of individual teacher quality must respect the struggle of striving for excellence, of experiment, of trial and error, of failure, of imagination in the practice and in the scholarship of teaching. That is a quest trivialized for teacher and learner alike in a five-minute end-of-course exercise with a B pencil.

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