A shedra is the philosophical college within a larger Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the institution in which monks pursue advanced study of Indian Buddhist philosophy as it was transmitted into Tibetan translation, organized traditionally around five major treatises covering the perfection of wisdom literature, the middle way philosophy of Madhyamaka, higher knowledge or Abhidharma, monastic discipline or Vinaya, and the logical and epistemological tradition of Pramana.
Completing the full shedra curriculum in the Gelug tradition, the school most associated with the largest and most systematized shedras, traditionally took on the order of fifteen to twenty years of study, at the end of which the most accomplished students could earn the geshe degree, a credential functionally comparable to an advanced doctorate in Buddhist philosophy.
Powers' introduction to Tibetan Buddhism describes the shedra curriculum as building a monk's capacity to reason through Buddhist philosophical positions rather than simply memorize them, which is why the institution places such heavy weight on formal argument as the primary means of testing whether a student actually understands a text rather than only recalling it. Shedras exist in some form across all four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, though the Gelug tradition elaborated the system most extensively and is most often cited as the model.