What the Best College Teachers Do
Book Review • Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Kindle Edition. 207 pp. $22.
Read time: 5 min
Summary
In What the Best College Teachers Do, author and educator Ken Bain collates years of research regarding the methods of the most effective college instructors. Across seven chapters, he thematically analyzes the pedagogical philosophies and practices of exemplary professors known for facilitating positive experiences and deep learning among their students. These two ‘acid tests’ form the basis of his definition of effective teaching: (1) evidence that most of one’s students are highly satisfied and inspired to continue to learn, and (2) how well the students learn to think critically and creatively about the discipline at hand.
The book is arranged around six major questions, including “what do they know about how we learn,” “how do they prepare to teach,” “what do they expect of their students,” “how do they conduct class,” “how do they treat their students,” and “how do they evaluate their students and themselves?”
Bain emphasizes that outstanding educators prepare for the classroom as a serious intellectual endeavor. They approach education not merely as the ‘transmission of information’ but as an opportunity to build critical thinking, problem-solving, and the active construction of their students’ knowledge bases.
He critiques traditional teaching methods that overly rely on monological lectures where teachers ‘talk to the blackboard’ as well as cultural naiveté that overlooks social factors possibly contributing to poor student performance.
Central to his conclusions is that genuine interest and belief in students’ potential mark the best educators, who see class lecture time as an interesting conversation rather than an ego-driven performance. Bain’s work spends a substantial amount of space inquiring into how highly effective teachers create a Socratic, “natural critical learning environment” where students tackle real problems that require questioning their assumptions and exploring and applying new ideas.
Moreover, What the Best College Teachers Do stresses the importance of instructors providing supportive feedback that stimulates students to progress intellectually and emotionally through a class, overcoming self-doubt and a sense of the irrelevance of the topics, among other obstacles to learning. Successful teachers treat their students with respect, foster a collaborative learning atmosphere, and encourage a ‘discipline mastery’ approach to education over a grade-based orientation.
In summary, Bain calls for professors to create a dynamic, student-centered environment that encourages inquisitiveness, personal knowledge construction, critical thinking, and the mastery of course content. Deep ‘learning’ is not merely for a passing grade but for personal and intellectual development in a given discipline.
Quotations
“All the professors we chose to put under our pedagogical microscope had achieved remarkable success in helping their students learn in ways that made a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how those students think, act, and feel” (5).
“When these highly effective educators try to teach the basic facts in their disciplines, they want students to see a portion of reality the way the latest research and scholarship in the discipline has come to see it. They don’t think of it as just getting students to ‘absorb some knowledge,’ as many other people put it” (27).
“One professor explained it this way: ‘It’s sort of Socratic . . . You begin with a puzzle—you get somebody puzzled, and tied in knots, and mixed up.’ Those puzzles and knots generate questions for students, he went on to say, and then you begin to help them untie the knots” (40).
“Rather than thinking just in terms of teaching history, biology, chemistry, or other topics, they talked about teaching students to understand, apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate evidence and conclusions. They stressed the ability to make judgments, to weigh evidence, and to think about one’s own thinking” (46).
“They seek ways to provide learners with feedback rather than simply judge their efforts” (58).
“You no longer concentrate on the ability to remember information but recognize that the power to remember increases as comprehension and the use of that understanding in reasoning grows” (84).
“‘If great thinkers felt the excitement of entering controversies and refuting opponents,’ Seeskin concludes, ‘why should students not be given a taste of the same thing?’ In his view, ‘advocacy generates controversy, and controversy arouses interest’” (88).
“More than anything else, the most successful communicators treated anything they said to their students—whether in fifty-minute lectures or in two-minute explanations—as a conversation rather than a performance” (118).
“Some outstanding teachers use survey forms or what might be called in the broadest sense a pre-test. On the first day of class, other people give students a list of the five to ten major questions the course will help them answer. They then ask the class members to rank their interests in each question” (157).
“Teaching is not just delivering lectures but anything we might do that helps and encourages students to learn—without doing them any major harm. . .. Teaching occurs only when learning takes place” (173). ❖
