What the Best College Teachers Do

What the Best College Teachers Do (Bain, 2004) is a good read for teachers interested in deepening their understanding of the art and craft of their profession. The book provides an in-depth definition, through field study research, of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Bain's research goes to the heart of what legislators and college accreditors call "assessment" by documenting what "teachers do that truly makes a difference in students' lives, and what any teacher can do to improve" (blurb by Richard Light on back cover). The best performers in any field are the ones most likely looking for ways to improve, but Bain's method does include examples of poor techniques for comparison. Bain offers numerous examples of highly effective classroom assessment techniques. One idea he offers is the "small group analysis." "Someone goes into the class while the instructor leaves the room. The consultant divides the students into small groups or pairs and asks each team to spend six or seven minutes discussing three questions: In what ways has the instruction/instructor helped you learn in this course? Can you suggest some changes in the instruction/course that would better help you to learn? If the course/instruction has helped you learn, what is the nature of that learning? Each team receives the questions on paper and is encouraged to take notes of their discussions. After six or seven minutes, the consultant brings the groups back together and gets feedback from some of them while inviting others to share any major additions to or disagreements with what they heard from their colleagues. The whole process takes less than twenty minutes and allows the consultant both to clarify (to ask those questions that we have all wanted to pursue when we read students' comments) and to verify (to find out if there are any divisions in the ranks)" (p. 159). The book describes the results of scholarly and also intuitive modes of inquiry concerned with more effective teaching and learning for the teacher that wants to help create better learning. This book provides some research-based ideas about how college teachers can use experimentation, research, analysis, and reflection to deepen student learning. The book is short (178 pages minus appendix etc.) with a conversational style that makes it a quick read in spite of the wealth of information.

Ken Bain's book is excellent, a must read for any college professor (and great for high school as well). Bain did extensive interviews with college professors who got excellent results with student learning (not just high popularity). He found certain common characteristics of this group of educators and shares the information about their manner of teaching in 6 major areas -- What do the best teachers know and understand? How do they prepare to teach? What do they expect of their students? What do they do when they teach? How do they treat students? How do they check their progress and evaulate their efforts? I have been a college teacher for 14 years and see some of what I do reflected in this book, but also new ideas and approaches. Bain stresses that overarching all is an attitude toward students -- believing that they can achieve, and helping them do so. An excellent book, written in a very readable and accessible style. Worth every penny.

I read about this book on a psychology teaching email list that I belong to and it seemed like it would be a great book. It turns out that the recommendations were correct. The author and his colleagues created a study where they followed college teachers form many disciplines and found what exactly made these people "the best college teachers." The author describes what they know about how students learn, how they prepare to teach, what they expect from their students, how they conduct class, how they treat their students, and how they evaluate their students and themselves. This isn't a "how to be a great teacher" book, but it gives many great suggestions for how to improve your teaching and your courses. I highly suggest this book to anyone who is interested in teaching and is interested in how to make their courses more student-centered.

As a professor myself, I highly recommend this book to anyone who teaches college students. While it doesn't offer easy answers or a fool-proof formula, it poses many helpful questions that have made me reconsider my strategies in front of the classroom- and so far to good effect. The fact that this book is based on real-life research makes it more than just a how-to book. It also makes me think about how completely unprepared my education made me to stand in front of students every day...

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.