The 1970s
IRT Helps Shape Direction of College

Almost as if on cue, a landmark event took place in 1976 that fell in line with the new direction set out for the college by the Missions Committee. In April of that year, the National Institute of Education (NIE) awarded the college a $3.6-million grant to establish the Institute for Research of Teaching IRT). The research that the institute would produce over the next ten years would have a powerful impact not only on the college, but also on the field of education. Professors Lee Shulman and Judith Lanier played key roles in securing the center for MSU. Both had strong reputations in the field, and were among a select few researchers who were beginning to pursue a line of research that placed the teacher front and center. It is evident from Lanier’s involvement on the committee that formulated the new missions for the college that she was much in favor of increased research activity, especially as it related to what made for effective teaching. Shulman, since joining the faculty in 1963, had been looking at the inquiry process among teachers in training. But his involvement with the fledgling medical school at MSU set him on the path, he said, to understanding the teacher as the crucial component in the learning process.

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Competition for the institute was stiff. Stanford University, which had been home to the National Center for Research on Teaching for the previous ten years, was a major contender. But MSU’s proposal ultimately prevailed, “and that began what is now, I would say, the mainstream perspective on the study of teaching, which is the studying of teachers as professionals, as people who autonomously think through problems, reason, strategically plan—rather than as simply emitters of behavior,” Shulman said.

The IRT as developed by Shulman and Lanier, who served as the institute’s initial co-directors, was truly ahead of its time. Its first and most obvious advance was its focus: teachers. Dean noted that until the formation of the IRT, most research in education had “focused upon the learner and the learning process.” The IRT as conceived and developed at the college represented a sharp turn toward the teacher.

The IRT’s innovation did not stop there. From the start, Shulman and Lanier wanted the IRT to be part of the college—not apart from it. “So we went to the dean at that time, Keith Goldhammer, and the provost and we made the following offer: ‘We don’t want to appoint any people in the IRT who won’t concurrently add an academic appointment in the College of Education,’” Shulman said. This single requirement guaranteed that the college would build a critical mass of faculty whose interests in teachers and teacher learning would place it among the leading institutions in the country.

The institute also reached out to scholars and researchers from other disciplines to better understand the cognitive processes of teachers. Over the years, the irt involved psychologists, sociologists, economists, linguists, and others. “[W]e recruited people . . . who brought with them what was then a very novel ethnographic or anthropological perspective to the study of teaching,” Shulman said, “and that became another hallmark of the irt . . . The whole effort was collaborative not only with teachers but with units throughout the university from linguistics and medicine to engineering and economics.”

A final innovation of the institute was the inclusion of working k-12 teachers as collaborators in its research. Lanier and Shulman felt strongly that teachers needed to be involved with the institute from the start. As it turned out, teachers became involved in every major research program in the irt, working half their days in their classrooms and the other with the irt. An article of faith at the irt was that research into teaching was a collaborative effort that would be incomplete without practicing teachers as part of the process.

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“It was spectacular,” remembered Annette Weinshank, who was one of the first seven teachers to be hired by the institute and would be part of the institute until 1985. “The irt was an opportunity of a lifetime. It was a tremendous outpouring of productive, exciting work. I think all of us who participated, certainly in those early years, felt privileged to have had that kind of opportunity.

“Lee [Shulman] and Judy [Lanier] had a vision of collaborative research and that meant everybody participated in everything. They pushed very hard in that they said ‘It’s really kind of goofy to have an institute for research on teaching without having teachers having some kind of presence.’ So thanks to them, we seven and the other teachers who subsequently came on board had a chance of a lifetime. We wrote papers, went to conferences, published technical reports, and published in refereed journals. It was an astonishingly productive environment.”

In keeping with the collaborative emphasis, the work of the IRT was organized into teams of researchers around the four dimensions of learning: the teacher, the learner, the subject matter, and the setting. Over the years, various research project areas included classroom strategy, written literacy, effective schools, socialization outcomes, mathematics, elementary science, high school standards, teachers’ practical ways of seeing, and so on.

“What did the IRT do for the College of Education at Michigan State?” asked Professor Andy Porter, who became co-director of the irt with Professor Jere Brophy in 1982 after Shulman left for a position at Stanford University. “It did a whole lot. Not that there weren’t great people there before the IRT, because it was the people who were there at the time that got the IRT in the first place. But the IRT really served as the catalyst for bringing in new people. At the time the college did an excellent job of producing large numbers of teachers and Ph.D.s as well, but you wouldn’t say it was a major research college in the way that it is today. I think the transition was built around the IRT.”

 The importance of the IRT’s ability to attract strong research talent cannot be overstated. Many of these researchers would go on to shape the college in the years to come. “Michigan State was one of the very few institutions anywhere that was able to employ new staff in any number during this time of depression for education programs,” Dean wrote.

By the early 1980s, the institute’s researchers had produced more than 140 papers, written some 40 book chapters, and published more than 40 journal articles aimed at teachers, teacher educators, and administrators. At one point, the institute had more than 12,000 people on the mailing list of its publication Communication Quarterly. Emerging from the research was a portrait of the teacher as the pivotal professional who actively engaged in decision making, planning, and whose conceptions played a powerful role in the learning process.

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“Part of the legacy of the irt,” Shulman recalled more than twenty-five years after he founded it, “was the notion of teacher knowledge and teacher understanding, and that has become almost ubiquitous in any of the work on teaching both in terms of research and policy. People are no longer comfortable—thank goodness—thinking about teacher behavior as the way of characterizing teachers.”