Book Reviews........

Review of What the Best College Teachers Do

Ken Bain, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004
eading this book is a joyful and inspiring journey for college teachers at all levels. The book focuses on what the best college teachers know and understand about their subject matter as well as the learning process; how they prepare; what they expect of their students; how they treat students; what they do; and how they evaluate teaching and student progress. A well written and clearly articulated book that can be read on at least two planes: reading for understanding and reading to apply it. It is unusual to find such a well-written book containing a wealth of knowledge you can take back to the job. Ken Bain (Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York Univ.) has conducted several years of careful research on a variety of campuses and the result is that good teaching can be learned! However, anyone who expects a simple list of dos and donts may be greatly disappointed with the book. To be one of the best college teachers, one has to make a systematic and reflective appraisal of own teaching approaches and strategies: Why do I do certain kinds of things and not others? What evidence about how people learn drives my teaching choices? How often do I do something because my professors did it? In other words, we need to treat teaching as a serious and important intellectual and creative work, an endeavor that benefits from careful observation and close analysis, from revision and refinement, as well as from dialogues with colleagues and the critiques of peers. Therefore teachers need to treat teaching as they likely treat their own scholarship or artistic creations. To define excellence, Ken Bain states that outstanding teachers are professors that had achieved remarkable success in helping most of their students learn in ways that made a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on how those students think, act, and feel. He then explores 6 broad questions (each is a book chapter) that were researched about the examined teachers: 1. What do the best teachers know and understand? They know their subjects extremely well. They use their knowledge to develop techniques for grasping fundamental principles and organizing concepts that others can use to begin building their own understanding and abilities. Best teachers are active and accomplished scholars, artists, or scientists, in other words they can do intellectually, physically, or emotionally what they expect from their students. Also they can think about their own thinking in the discipline, analyzing its nature and evaluating its quality, exhibiting a capacity to think metacognitively. They also have at least an intuitive understanding of human learning. 2. How do they prepare to teach? As a serious intellectual endeavor. Lectures, discussion sections, problem-based sessions, etc., are treated as intellectually demanding and important as their research and scholarship. The best teachers begin with questions about student learning objectives, rather than about what the teacher will do. 3. What do they expect of their students? Simply put, the best teachers expect more. They favor objectives that embody the kind of thinking and acting expected for life, and they expect high achievement. 4. What do they do when they teach? They create what Bain calls Natural Critical Learning Environments, where people learn by confronting intriguing, beautiful, or important problems; authentic tasks that will challenge students to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine their mental models of reality. Learners feel a sense of control over their education, work collaboratively with others; believe that their work will be considered fairly and honestly; and try, fail, and receive feedback from expert learners in advance of and separate from any summative judgment of their effort 5. How do they treat students? With what can only be called simple decency. Best teachers often display openness, reflect a strong trust in students, believe that students want to learn, and they assume, until proven otherwise, that they can. 6. How do they check their progress and evaluate their efforts? All the studied teachers have some systematic program (some more elaborate than others) to assess their own efforts and to make appropriate changes. Assessment of students flows from primary learning objectives. I found the book so useful for anyone teaching at the college level (regardless of whether you are a graduate student teaching for the first time, an experienced educator at the undergraduate level, or a top-flight researcher delivering graduate seminars) that I already recommended it to our existing faculty, purchased a copy for all new faculty arriving at our department this year, and will share the results with our graduate students in their required Scholarship of Teaching and Learning seminar. I can only hope my colleagues find the book as engaging as I do. I want to finish this book review with a quote (that is in the book) from Paul Baker: My strongest feeling about teaching is that you must begin with the student. As a teacher you do not begin to teach, thinking of your own ego and what you know The moments of the class must belong to the student not the students, but to the very undivided student. You dont teach a class. You teach a student. Enrique Palou, Center for Engineering Education, Univ. de las Americas, Puebla, Mexico
2005 Institute of Food Technologists Vol. 4, 2005JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE EDUCATION