ABSTRACT
Teaching is seemingly different from the other learned professions on several interrelated dimensions. In comparison with other professions, it is massive (e.g., more than 3,000,000 practitioners compared with law’s 400,000) and less well compensated.1 There are, for example, approximately 1,300 schools of education in contrast to 180 law schools and 125 medical schools. In teaching, unlike most professions, the client does most of the work (viz., the students labor to learn their lessons, but the lawyer’s clients can do very little on their own to produce justice). Unlike other professions, teachers do not set or control the standards for their profession. The skills of the teaching profession, in contrast to the skills of the other professions, seem quite accessible to laypersons. Nearly every adult teaches someone something in the course of daily life and believes he or she could teach school; they simply prefer not to. Indeed teaching is seen as a natural act that can be readily observed in those who have had no professional training in the profession of teaching. Moreover, professional training in teaching is apparently not very difficult because, unlike the other professions, persons of modest abilities are admitted to teacher education programs, and few of them fail. In fact, almost all earn top marks for their efforts (Darling-Hammond, 2001; Howey & Zimpher, 1996).
