In "A Knowledge Base for the Teaching Profession: What Would It Look Like and How Can We Get One?" James Hiebert, Ronald Gallimore and James Stigler acknowledge that the U.S. teaching profession does not draw heavily upon a shared base of solid "craft knowledge" grounded in the analysis and communication of what effective teachers have learned. "Practitioner knowledge," they call it. They offer three features of such knowledge that are useful to teachers, identify three additional features that must be supplied (e.g. verifiability) if full advantage is to be taken of it, and speculate on what would be needed for all this to be done in a systematic way in the United States. They're skeptical, however, due to the presence of what they see as two separate education communities, one comprised of researchers, the other of practitioners, with different languages, values, priorities and communications systems. You'll find this thoughtful Educational Researcher article at www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol31_05/AERA310502.pdf.
