4: Consensus and the Knowledge Base for Teaching and Teacher Education¹

As recently as 15 years ago, one could attend the “invisible college for research on teaching,” quietly held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and hear passionate, academic discussions led by the prominent researchers of the time. Upon entering these meeting rooms, one would have heard these researchers asking whether the rapidly growing body of research at the time was leading the study of teaching to our firstever theory of teaching. These were exciting times, with the best minds in the field offering their opinions in debates on conducting classroom-based research. Researchers of teaching conducting seminal work—including David Berliner, Bruce Biddle, Jere Brophy, Mick Dunkin, Carolyn Evertson, Tom Good, Greta Morine-Dershimer, Lee Shulman, Jane Stallings, Barak Rosenshine, Claire Weinstein, Bob Soar, Fred McDonald, and Nate Gage, perhaps the leading scholar on teaching at the time—weighed in on the question of whether we were approaching a theory of teaching. They brought their graduate students to listen, and to share what they were reading as well.