Signature Pedagogies

Signature pedagogies are the types of teaching common to a discipline that organize how practitioners of a specific profession (Shulman, 2005) or academic discipline (Gurung, Chick, and Haynie, 2009) are educated . Signature pedagogies often cut across courses or institutions. Signature pedagogies are a subset (a more specific type) of the broader concept of Subject Specific Pedagogies. A signature pedagogy has three dimensions (Shulman, 2005):

1. Surface structure: The specific techniques and acts of teaching and learning.
2. Deep structure: The set of assumptions underpinning why that is a good way to impart the knowledge, skills, habits, and habits of mind of the discipline.
3. Implicit structure: The moral dimension that captures the beliefs about the professional attitudes, values, and dispositions of the discipline.

Understanding the how your teaching methods are guided by the discipline in which you are situated can help you understand and formulate learning outcomes suitable to your field and assessment strategies, and can help you foster metacognition in your students (defining how to "think like an historian" etc. Examining the signature pedagogy of your discipline can help you to better understand the means by which learning takes place in your subject area, and how well you are preparing your students to be the next generation of experts in their field.

A signature pedagogy is not necessarily the same as the tasks that one actually performs in the profession (but can be, or can be a simulacrum of such tasks). For example, practicing lawyers may spend little time sitting in a semicircle with 120 colleagues responding to questions about a case. They are intended, however, to foster the tools of inquiry or habits of mind of a profession.

While there is no settled or universally agreed signature pedagogy for a discipline, posited examples include:

• Teacher education: Examining video of instruction, analyzing student work, lesson study, Critical Friends Groups (consultancy and tuning protocols), and student teaching have all been proposed as signature pedogogies in education (those critiquing teacher education have suggested that the actual signature pedagogies may be reading and discussing readings about teaching and/or lecture).
• Legal Profession: The legal seminar (semi-circle, students have studied a case, the professor cold calls a student, professor cold calls additional students with specific prompts to respond).
• Business School: The case method
• Medical Profession: Clinical rounds
• History: Analyzing narratives and sources, crafting claims, making arguments
• Literary studies: Close reads with a heuristic of conflict (conflicting critiques and perspectives), conversation (understanding different interpretations), and questioning (curiosity). The Socratic seminar. (those critiquing literary studies have suggested that the actual signature pedagogy is understanding replicating the professors perspective or interpretation).
• Mathematics: Mathematical problem solving: a) problems of interest are posed, b) sollutions are collaboratively generated, c) conceptual resaoning is applied, d) multiple approaches and solutions are encouraged (and critiqued). (Critiques have argued that the actual signature pedagogy of mathematics education are applying procedures and deriving the one right answer the one right way).

References

Shulman, L. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Dædalus, 134(3), 52-59.

Gurung, R. A. R, Chick, N.L., & Haynie, A.(Eds.)(2009). Exploring signature pedagogies: Approaches to teaching disciplinary habits of mind.Sterling, VA: Stylus