What the Best College Teachers Do
From Publishers Weekly
Bains sound and scholarly yet exuberant promotion of Americas “best college teachers” abounds with jaunty anecdotes and inspiring opinions that make student-centered instruction look not only infectious, but downright imperative. Teachers may enjoy the books plummy examples from their peers interdisciplinary curriculasuch as the Harvard chemistry professor whose “lesson on polymers becomes the story of how the development of nylons influenced the …
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December 19th, 2009 at 1:54 am
Ken Bain has written precisely the sort of book I wish someone had shared with me during my graduate school days. Like many of my colleagues, I was left to my own devices inside the college classroom. My solution was to emulate those professors I respected as a student. Other than a few days of preparation in 1990, I never had any sort of systematic training about good classroom performance or how students learn.
Ken Bain, Director for the Center of Teaching Excellence at New York University, has provided a valuable resource for all of us in a similar situation. Perhaps the most striking feature of Bain’s book is that it is not a how-to approach. If you are looking for a host of specific techniques to apply, then other teaching resources will better suit your needs. Instead, Bain’s book looks at the best college teaching from a more bird’s eye view to identify the essential characteristics of our best teachers. Some of the key themes include:
- How the best teachers connect content knowledge with real-world practice so that students exhibit learning (change).
- How the best teachers exhibit some combination of 13 goals or targets for preparing to teach.
- What the best teachers expect of their students.
- How the best teachers draw from seven unifying principles to deliver a course.
- The types of invitations that the best teachers extend to their students when attempting to draw them into a learning community.
- How we can learn more about our teaching, and improve, by pursuing a robost course evaluation system.
These are the key themes. Each is developed with a variety of examples that the author has gathered over the years while working at Vandebilt, Northwestern, and now NYU. The book unquestionably draws from a variety of important research articles, but in no way is this a dry read about pedagogical research. Ken Bain tells a good story in each chapter and uses both his experiential base and the literature to bolster his conclusions. What emerges is a practical, wise, and intelligent discussion of the best college teaching that is written in plain English. I read the book in two evenings quite easily. It is unusual to find such a well-written book containing a wealth of knowledge you can take back to the job.
This book is suitable for anyone teaching at the college level. Regardless of whether you are a graduate student preparing to teach for the first time, an experienced educator at the undergraduate level, or a top-flight researcher delivering graduate seminars, I have no doubt there is something we can all learn from each chapter.
Maybe as my final point I will share that I found the book so useful I purchased a copy for all new faculty arriving at my university this year. I can only hope my colleagues find the book as engaging as I do.
December 19th, 2009 at 3:48 am
As a former college professor who does some online teaching from time to time, I was fascinated by Bain’s book. Bain identified a number of teachers who made a meaningful impact on student lives. He and his team followed up to ask, “What makes them so great?”
And he has answers. Anyone who’s been teaching awhile will not be surprised. Ask questions. Get students involved. Don’t just tell — teach students how to learn. And so on.
But, as other reviewers have noted. Bain’s “best” professors appear to dwell among the Olympians of higher education. We don’t have a complete list of the “best,” but we get references to Harvard and Vanderbilt.
In the real world, the vast majority of today’s students enter large state institutions. They begin with large lecture classes. It *is* possible to personalize those classes to some extent but you certainly don’t have room for discussion.
Additionally, most students juggle work, family and social pressures along with school. Many spend more time watching television than studying. A friend who won a major teaching award told me, “I don’t make students do the reading. I know they won’t.”
Bain also ignores institutional pressures on faculty. When I taught online for a well-respected university, I was told, “You’re expected to give at least a couple of C’s and F’s in every class.”
OK, I said, then we should be fair: we need to let them know there’s a forced curve, as Harvard does. No dice. And in this particular class, most students were majors who worked full-time. Their assignments were linked to their jobs. All were motivated to work hard. As Bain says, high grades can also reflect high learning — but just try and prove it.
I’ve also been in environments where students were expected to get A’s — a B-plus was the closest to a failing grade. Students who genuinely wanted to learn were frustrated by whiny, do-nothing classmates who could hardly provide a stimulating classroom conducive to learning.
Most important Bain dismisses evaluations. but in reality, nearly every professor will live or die by student opinion. And great teaching does not always lead to top evaluations. I once heard a talk about an experimental astronomy class, where students engaged in participatory exercises throughout the term. They performed better on tests and appeared to learn far more thoroughly. Yet evaluations were lower than those of conventional classes. Unless the professor has some protection (and even tenured profs can get penalized for weak reports), you can bet he’ll go back to the tried and true methods next time.
I had a similar experience myself, while teaching in a large state university. I would overhear students say, “I’ve never participated as much as I have in your class.” One group of students even organized a little party for our class — and they were commuters. We had a great community and students learned a lot. But the course evaluations had no place to describe these experiences. Students told me openly, “I base my evaluations on the grade I get.”
If you’re going to read this book, I’d also recommend Rebekah Nathan’s Freshman Year. Nathan, the professor who went undercover to learn how students really live, identifies some reasons students continue to be demotivated. For example, Bain notes that an attitude of “Everyone is right” comes at a stage of learning development. But Nathan shows us orientation exercises where everyone shares an opinion — no judgment, no synthesis, no analysis.
A professor can get lots of good ideas from reading Bain’s book. Putting those ideas into practice — well, that’s another book.
What would be far more useful would be a serious study on learning. In Chapter 2, Bain cites studies showing that students don’t change beliefs readily. I think he’s right. A college sophomore who was studying psychology told me, “I don’t like what we’re learning. Depression isn’t real. I was brought up to think about those who are worse off than I am — and then I won’t be depressed anymore.”
Will this student’s belief be changed by the “best” teaching? Does she belong in a university at all? These questions should haunt us as we study the real issues of higher education.
December 19th, 2009 at 6:06 am
If I had to summarize this book in two words, they would be “only connect” (E.M. Forster). Bain advises college teachers to orient their teaching to the students in the room. We–and I say we because I am one–need to know what presuppositions students bring to the class; we need to keep students’ attention by connecting the new to the familiar; we need to turn students into learners and thinkers, instead of cramming facts into their heads. Etc. etc.
All this sound like common sense, but in fact it goes against the standard orientation of college teachers. The usual thing is to think first about the subject of the course, about which the teacher is presumably an expert. The subject, and the teacher’s deep knowledge of it, steers lectures and exams. The problem is that this can put students to sleep and leave them with an acquaintance with the subject that fades soon after the final exam.
I’m glad I bought this book, I recommend it, and I think it’s going to make my own teaching better. All that being said, here are some more negative reactions. What if everything Bain says is actually true? What would that say about the American college student? His advice makes the student sound like a fragile creature who’s got to be seduced into an interest in anything outside of himself.
For example, Bain says professors shouldn’t use the word “requirements” on the syllabus. They should promise students specific valuable things, but never demand. In fact, he seems to say that the exact way grades are computed shouldn’t be stated. What would happen if there were clear and straightforward demands? Would students crumble?
The huge emphasis Bain puts on connecting course material to a student’s personal concerns makes me wonder what would happen if a professor got up and talked about… the civil war …computers …botany. Can’t teachers count on the inherent interest of anything?
The advice in the book frequently ignores real world teaching problems. Bain is very positive about take home exams, thinking it’s silly to pass up their advantages because of worries about cheating. But these worries are serious.
He’s very positive about the idea that every exam should be cumulative, with only the last one counting. A student should be able to miss an exam with impunity. They probably had some good reason. Hmm. In the best of all possible worlds, yes. My students wouldn’t come to the exams that didn’t count.
Be tolerant of late work, he says; there was probably a good reason. That’s not my experience. Students need firm deadlines or some of them will never do any work.
It puzzles me that Bain’s best teachers do things in their classrooms that really would be unworkable in mine. There’s nothing in the book that addresses this disconnect.