What the Best College Teachers Do

Rating:
Summary: Highly useful book!
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Read for Those Who Value Teaching
Review: 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.