Signature Pedagogy: A Framework for Thinking about Management Education

This issue is about cases and projects, two staples of management education. As I pondered the issue I wondered what my editorial could contribute that would be new about these two venerable management pedagogies. Then one day, while reading in the field of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), I came across a new and intriguing concept: signature pedagogy. Reading about signature pedagogies left me with some questions about education for the management profession. In this editorial I will explain some of what I have learned from my reading and then go beyond the articles in this issue to raise a bigger question for our profession. According to Lee Shulman, former President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, signature pedagogies are distinctive ways of teaching that characterize the educational process in a specific profession (Shulman, 2005a, 2005b) or discipline (Gurung, Chick & Haynie, 2009). They are also pervasive, cutting across programs, courses and institutions that offer training for that profession. Familiar examples include the Socratic method of case analysis in law, clinical rounds in medicine, student teaching in education, and studio pedagogy in architecture. Signature pedagogies also “nearly always entail public student performance” (Shulman, 2005, p. 57), making students both visible and accountable to teachers and to peers. Although signature pedagogies may differ across disciplines, they share three overarching learning goals. Professional education is a synthesis of three apprenticeships: