RSSWhat the Best College Teachers Do
March 17th, 2006 | View Comments
Author: Ken Bain
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Rating: 
Buy What the Best College Teachers Do on Amazon.com
This book describes a large ethnographic study of teaching at the college level, trying to uncover the characteristics that separate good professors from bad, and exceptional professors from the merely good. In the process, this book reveals that the best professors seem to have an intuitive grasp of prominent theories of learning and assessment.
They understand that new knowledge is constructed from pre-existing knowledge and thus students’ prior experiences and misconceptions must be addressed during the course of instruction–learning results from an interaction between what the teacher knows and what the students know; poor teachers often view teaching and learning as a unidirectional process with knowledge flowing from teacher to students.
They understand that students must process knowledge deeply in order to learn it and thus they must assign challenging but meaningful coursework; poor teachers often assign busy work without providing appropriate context for meaningful understanding.
They understand that students’ learning is profoundly affected by the social world and thus a good portion of their teaching efforts must be focused towards developing a classroom environment in which all kinds of students can grow intellectually and personally. While good teachers seek to develop their students’ talents, mediocre or poor teachers often only intend to pluck it out.
From an educational research standpoint, the more anthropological approach described in this book did allow the researchers to better capture the emotional core of good teaching and learning—the excitement, the immersion, the payoff when you see everything start to come together—and it may have made it more accessible to a general audience.
But it may have sacrificed scientific rigor in the process. This kind of study took an enormous amount of resources to complete and its somewhat ad hoc nature makes it hard to replicate.
This book also left me with a number of unanswered questions:
Given that very few teachers at the college level ever undergo any sort of formal teaching training, how is it that some teachers come to develop sound teaching principles while so many others don’t?
Now that we have some idea of what separates good teachers from bad, how do we instill good teaching principles in college teachers?
Although it did not tell me everything I wanted to know, I would recommend reading this book if you are at all interested in teaching on any level. I found the descriptions of the bad teachers comforting, in the sense that it supported my own sense of which of my college professors were good and which were bad, and I found the descriptions of the good teachers very inspiring.
Buy What the Best College Teachers Do on Amazon.com
Yvonne posted this on March 17th, 2006 @ 8:49pm in Book Reviews, Education | Permalink to "What the Best College Teachers Do"
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