ABSTRACT
There are implications for research into teaching, the training of teachers and the evaluation of teaching, and these will be sketched out in a moment. First, however, something must be said about the idea of teaching as a professional discipline. Education has long had a rather uncertain place in the academic scheme of things. There are doubts about where it belongs, indeed whether it belongs at all. Probably some of this uncertainty is a result of historical and social factors: it has not always been part of higher education, and teaching does not have the unambiguous professional status that medicine, law and even engineering have. But there are deeper, more academic worries as well. It has not been clear what kind of a discipline education is, and some have wondered whether it is actually a proper discipline at all.
