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Given the current situation in education, how can we possibly hope to attract able, imaginative, and honorable people into teaching and how, once they enter, can we sustain them? Admitting that this will be very difficult, we think our best hope lies in working to make education what we would call a "strong profession."

Sociologists have, of course, written many volumes about the characteristics of a profession. Our view is derived from a distillation of those theories, especially theories advanced by Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, and also from experience we have had since becoming dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Strong professions have two outstanding features. First, they can certify the competence of their members to act more effectively on the problems of their guild than non-members can do. Second, they exercise considerable influence in the governance of the domain in which they act. Let me say a word about both of these characteristics.

Certifying the Competence of Educators
At the Harvard Law School, cases are actual legal opinions. Students read them and professors teach them via the Socratic method, calling (without warning) on students and asking them questions that force them to reason to the essence of the legal precedent set by the case. At the Harvard Business School, members of the faculty write cases that describe "real-world" problems in business, government, or the nonprofit sector, and students are asked to analyze those problems in study groups. Then, in class, professors ask volunteers to tell them what they would do to resolve the problem at hand. At the Harvard Medical School, cases are very short, often only a paragraph. Cases are given to students in class, where they immediately pool whatever they do and do not know about the situation with which they have been presented. They then agree on who will do research about specific unresolved questions and, then, come together again to pool and refine their knowledge, before once again going off to do further research. Implicit in these different approaches to case teaching are different ways of thinking and acting. The Harvard Law School is teaching students to reason from precedent—to think like a lawyer. The Harvard Business School is teaching students to make decisions and take action—to act like a manager. And the Harvard Medical School is teaching students to diagnose an illness—to reason like a doctor.

Expert Influence in a Given Domain
In addition to being able to certify the competence of their members, strong professions have the power to influence the domain in which their members hold expertise. Through the American Medical Association and other professional associations, doctors have considerable influence over health care policy. To be sure, their influence is always in contest with that of other professional groups that have their own primary interests—nurses, pharmaceutical companies, and the like. And the influence of doctors is always also in contest with that of lobbyists for different segments of the public—the AARP, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and many more. Although the status and power of professions are never set or held constant, their power ebbing and flowing in response to challenges for control of their domain, strong professions, by definition, have more power than competing groups.

How could education become a strong profession? The first step, we believe, will require that we identify how educators characteristically think and act. Of course, teaching is too personal an art always to be done in the same way. Without in any way demeaning the artistic side of educating, we still think it is possible that we can identify the distinctive ways in which educators enter educational encounters and proceed through them. Actually, we mean to be more prescriptive than that.

The Promise of Education Research
My optimism—perhaps, guarded optimism is more appropriate—about our capacity slowly, but surely to learn what it is that is pretty much always involved in effective instruction comes from my sense that we really are making progress in education research. Statisticians have now developed techniques whereby one can measure change over time using repeated waves of data. This gives us newly powerful ways to describe and analyze learning. Research syntheses, which enable one to aggregate the findings of different studies, also promise to help us build a stronger knowledge base concerning effective instructional practices.

Finally, we now recognize that along with traditional disciplinary research, we need more active modes of experimentation. Engaging in design experiments will enable us to test theories in the murky world of real-world practice. Developing active treatment trials, in which one experiments with different instructional strategies within different school settings, will enable us to figure out which interventions are most effective.