Lee Shulman

Lee S. Shulman (born September 28, 1938) is an American educational psychologist and reformer. He has made notable contributions to the study of teaching, assessment of teaching, and the fields of medicine, science, mathematics, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Background
Shulman was born on September 28, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the only son of Jewish immigrants who owned a small delicatessen on the Northwest Side of Chicago. He attended a Yeshiva high school.

Shulman is a professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Education, past president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, past president of the American Educational Research Association, and the recipient of several awards recognizing his educational research. From 1963 to 1982, Shulman was a faculty member at Michigan State University, where he founded and co-directed the Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT).

Shulman is credited with popularizing the phrase "pedagogical content knowledge" (PCK). He was the 2006 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for his 2004 book, The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning and Learning to Teach.

Shulman is also recognized for his publications and speeches about the higher education field of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). He notably distinguished SoTL from scholarly teaching, which he described as the work "every one of us should be engaged in every day that we are in a classroom, in our office with students, tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we play pedagogically." SoTL, on the other hand, is "when we step back and reflect systematically on the teaching we have done, in a form that can be publicly reviewed and built upon by our peers." This emphasis on public review and developing a collective body of knowledge was tied to his larger point that SoTL removes the widespread experience of "pedagogical solitude" by relocating postsecondary teaching within "a community of scholars." This, in turn, will elevate the status of teaching in higher education and expand what's known about teaching and learning in higher education.

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)
Shulman (1986) claimed that the emphases on teachers' subject matter knowledge and pedagogy were being treated as mutually exclusive. He believed that teacher education programs should combine the two knowledge fields. To address this dichotomy, he introduced the notion of pedagogical content knowledge that includes pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge, among other categories. His initial description of teacher knowledge included curriculum knowledge, and knowledge of educational contexts.