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What the Best College Teachers Do
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What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators.
The short answer is―it's not what teachers do, it's what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out―but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.
In stories both humorous and touching, Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students' discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.
Product details
Hardcover: 207 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (April 30, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674013255
ISBN-13: 978-0674013254
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
153 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#17,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is a sweet book that many will find interesting and even, at times, inspiring. It recounts some `best practices' utilized by top teachers. It acknowledges that there are no magic bullet solutions, that the process of teaching is complex and that as teachers we must be ever vigilant and ever open to change. It is broken down into 7 chapters, each of which asks a question, e.g., "How do top teachers prepare to teach?" "What do they expect of their students?" "How do they conduct class?" and so on.There are helpful ideas here and a few key ones: e.g. it is very important to not only understand your discipline but to also know the key controversies, historical issues, methodological conflicts, and so on within that discipline. The most important idea in the book: abandon `simple transmittal' ideas of teaching and strive, instead, to create a learning community. Make `student learning' the focus of the class.This is very interesting and, in some ways, cogent. Unfortunately, the book has very little to say about the current state of teaching, the current state of American universities and the administrative challenges to developing a student learning model that could also be evaluated.In my classes, e.g., there is a wide mix of students--students from different schools, students from different majors, students who are freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. I have students who are highly-motivated auditors, students who are taking the class because it fills a requirement, students who are taking the class because it fits their work schedule, students who couldn't enroll in the closed course that they really wanted to take, and so on. I have A students and I have occasional D students, students who are passionate about the material and students who are in college because they feel that they have to be there, in order to secure the kind of job that will enable them to have the things which they desire.At the same time, my state mandates the use of a particular teaching evaluation instrument in addition to my departmental evaluation instrument. Evaluations are utilized in assessing junior faculty for promotion, associate professors for promotion to full professor, post-tenure reviews and for all nominees for the multiple teaching awards available within the university and university system.We have, in short, committed ourselves to a number of things (easily-administered evaluation systems, `access', `diverse populations', `nontraditional students', etc.) that complicate the advice offered by Dr. Bain. We know, for example, that student evaluations are radically flawed. The numbers skew up in small, elective courses, skew down in large, required courses. They do not, by any stretch of the imagination, measure student learning. They encourage `consumerism'.On the other hand, the kind of apparatus which Dr. Bain envisions to actually measure student learning--looking closely at all course materials, sitting in on more than one or two classes, studying student papers and exams to measure the degree of their learning, and so on is simply not `administrable' given the size and complexity of the operation. Each of us can develop a sense of what our students have learned and that is very important; the focus on that learning is very important. Our evaluation systems, department- , college- and campus-wide, however, are very, very crude and they may actually hinder learning, in some important respects. They are, however, fully institutionalized.In the late 60's I taught at West Point. All students, by class, took the same courses; these courses were required; they all had 15 students per section; the students were `sectioned' by merit (i.e. prior performance). Each class was resectioned multiple times in the course of a semester (usually 3 times), so that each instructor knew the level of quality of a class, saw the final work from the previous sectioning period, and could actually assess whether or not the previous sectioning period's instructor had contributed to the student's learning or not. We had a floating instructor so that we were freed up to visit one another's classes on a regular basis. The institution was constantly visited by high school guidance counsellors, senior officers, etc., so that `class visitations' were an everyday occurrence and not disruptive. All of our classes were taught at the same time. In yearling (sophomore) comparative literature (more like `world literature' actually) the classes were all in the early afternoon, right after physical training, hot showers and many-caloried lunches, so that attention spans were more or less even across the 15 sections of the course.We also rotated the preparation of lesson plans for each block of instruction, so that each of us could see the kind of planning that the other instructors were capable of producing. Our rating officer (i.e. the boss) regularly examined papers that we had graded and evaluated our acuity and the quality of our comments. This is the only kind of structure in which evaluation of instruction can be conducted with anything approaching the kind of reliability that I would consider serious.Needless to say, there is nothing in civilian undergraduate education that is remotely like this in 2011. That does not mean that we cannot have superb teaching. My point is that we have already institutionalized a whole host of practices which need to be taken into account when we talk, seriously, about teaching. We begin with existing structures--the results of 40+ years of budgetary/policy decisions; then we can consider significant changes.These wider contexts are almost wholly ignored in Dr. Bain's book. To take but a single point: the vast majority of key (for me, language-centered) education in the regional public institution which most students attend is conducted by contingent faculty. These faculty survive or `fail' based on student evaluations. That fact results in educational practices, some, perhaps many, of which run counter to Dr. Bain's recommendations. I support Dr. Bain's recommendations, at least the great majority of them, but given the academic contexts which we have created they strike me as almost other-worldly.
I suspect that most instructors who will read this book already possess much of the wisdom contained in its pages—and that’s fine. Who doesn’t benefit from positive affirmation of good habits and effective practice? But this volume doesn’t pretend to be a “how-to†manual or the academic equivalent of “Teaching for Dummies.†Instead of providing concrete advice or recipes for good teaching, Bain distills the wisdom and methodology of the most highly effective college instructors into a clear and focused analysis of approaches to teaching that yield the best results.To no one’s surprise, it turns out that an instructor’s beliefs about teaching, learning, and students’ potential have a profound impact on that instructor’s effectiveness. Bain first establishes what he means by outstanding teaching (“helping students learn in ways that made a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how those students think, act, and feelâ€). It’s important to note the three dimensions of learning alluded to here—thought, behavior, and affect. All aspects are essential for meaningful teaching and learning.Bain then discusses, in lucid and enlightening detail, how the best instructors prepare, what they expect of their students, how they teach, how they interact with students, and how they assess their students and themselves. Both beginning teachers and veterans will benefit from his analysis. And those readers who are not teachers will come away with an appreciation for the complexity of the profession, which is part art, part craft, and part science.Highly recommended.
First off, a little info about myself:I teach physics and engineering at the pre-U and undergraduate level. I have consistently received good teaching ratings from colleagues and students alike, and I have even garnered an award for teaching in the first two years of my career.When I purchased this book, I thought it was a simple "cookbook" to highlight the best practices. To my pleasant surprise, it is not. It is extremely well written and organised, and deceptively easy to read as it is filled with anecdotes. However, it is jam packed with valuable advice/practices which require insight and experience to fully appreciate. The book nevertheless puts forth convincing arguments as to why each practice is worthy of your consideration.The book also challenged, motivated, and convinced me to think about my teaching in ways many books don't (with the exception of another equally wonderful but complementary book by Susan Ambrose: How Learning Works). All of my best practices (some discovered by accident, and most from students' feedback) are highlighted in this book. How I wished I had read this book before I started teaching, it would have saved me from much grief and frustration. More importantly, since this book distills the best practices from many great teachers, I find myself fulfilling only a fraction of what a great teacher should be. The good news is, teaching can be learned, if one is willing to. My understanding of what teaching and learning means has been greatly expanded, and my students are reaping the benefits even now.One final note: though this book contains the best practices, it only has scant references to studies on the best teaching and learning practices by leading educational psychologists (experts who know how our brains are wired to learn). Nevertheless, practices highlighted in this book reflect major conclusions reported in educational journals. As such, for in-depth understanding of why certain practices work at the cognitive and emotional level, I recommend you get the book by Susan Ambrose: How Learning Works, which summarizes the most important findings on learning by researchers. I find both books complement each other nicely.All the best in nurturing the next generation!EDIT: After reading through some of the negative comments from reviewers, I am compelled to reiterate the following: This book is deceptively easy to read, but is filled with practical, life changing advice. For example, a common problem in learning is what Bain termed the plug and chug learning. Students absorb info and regurgitate it during exams resulting in shallow learning (and many teachers are responsible for this). How do we overcome this problem? Bain condensed 7 extremely good methods to overcome this problem (applicable in small class settings or in lecture halls) -- on the last paragraph of pg. 41! Only a single paragraph! And you see this pattern repeated many times over. Therefore, please read with attention to details and get ready when the "gems" pop up. It took me 4 days to complete a single chapter because I had to constantly understand, review and, more importantly, reflect upon what I have read.
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