By World War II teaching already was America's most investigated profession, the object of many studies, much criticism, and repeated proposals for reform. The postwar explosion of higher education, the consequent growth of the social sciences, and increasing efforts at school reform fueled a huge growth in research on education, and more investigations and reform proposals followed. Investigators scrutinized teachers' education, the conditions of their work, the unions they joined, the salaries they earned, how and why they made decisions, and many related subjects.
As I worked on this project, I read many of these studies, but I gradually saw that even in this accelerating blizzard of research there was little about the work of teaching itself. Researchers probed the occupation from dozens of angles and produced boxcar loads of studies, but only a few asked the rudimentary questions: What sort of an endeavor is teaching? What kinds of problems must teachers solve, and how do they solve them? And what would it take to solve them in ways that promote ambitious teaching and learning?
Cohen, David K (2011). Teaching and its Predicaments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA
