Inspiration for Great Teaching
We’re dedicating today’s message to beloved author and educator Ken Bain, who was the founding director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Vanderbilt University and the president of the Best Teachers Institute. When we learned of his passing last month, we wanted to honor his life and work and share some of his wonderful teaching advice with all of you.
For fifteen years, Ken Bain studied what makes great teachers so effective and what can make a college course powerful and memorable. After concluding his study, he wrote the book What the Best College Teachers Do, which James Lang called “the single most inspiring and thought-provoking work in the field.” We’re grateful that we’ve gotten to read and discuss the book with many of you in faculty reading groups over the years, and today we’ll share some favorite excerpts.
Simply put, the best teachers believe that learning involves both personal and intellectual development and that neither the ability to think nor the qualities of being a mature human are immutable. People can change, and those changes—not just the accumulation of information—represent true learning. (p. 83)
The major ideas that animate the best teachers stem from a very basic observation: Human beings are curious animals. People learn naturally while trying to solve problems that concern them. They develop an intrinsic interest that guides their quest for knowledge. (p. 46)
The most effective teachers use class time to help students think about information and ideas the way scholars in the discipline do. They think about their own thinking and make students explicitly aware of that process, constantly prodding them to do the same. They do not think only in terms of teaching their discipline; they think about teaching students to understand, apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate evidence and conclusions. Some use a Socratic method; others accomplish much the same end with a combination of explanations and questions. “We cannot learn to reason without something to reason about,” one teacher told us, “but knowledge comes not through rote memorization of isolated facts, but from the ability to reason, that is, the ability to draw conclusions from reason.” (pp. 114–115)
When we encounter new material, we try to comprehend it in terms of something we think we already know. We use our existing mental models to shape the sensory inputs we receive. That means that when we talk to our students, our thoughts do not travel seamlessly from our brains to theirs. The students bring paradigms to the class that shape how they construct meaning. … when these highly effective instructors 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. Because they believe that students must use their existing mental models to interpret what they encounter, they think about what they do as stimulating construction, not “transmitting knowledge.” (pp. 26–27)
The best teaching occurred when people came into their classes filled with intentions to stimulate every student’s interests, to communicate clearly and effectively, to help everybody understand, to provoke responses, to foster deep thinking, to engage, and to entertain multiple perspectives. (p. 120)
The best college and university teachers create what we might call a natural critical learning environment in which they embed the skills and information they wish to teach in assignments (questions and tasks) students will find fascinating—authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenging students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental models of reality. They create a safe environment in which students can try, come up short, receive feedback, and try again. Students understand and remember what they have learned because they master and use the reasoning abilities necessary to integrate it with larger concepts. They become aware of the implications and applications of the ideas and information. They recognize the importance of measuring their own work intellectually as they do it, and in the process they routinely apply the intellectual standards of a variety of disciplines. They cease to be Aristotelian physicists and become Newtonian ones because they’ve come to care enough to question themselves. (p. 47)
The best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help students learn. Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even as a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia. For our subjects, that scholarship centered around four fundamental inquiries: (1) What should my students be able to do intellectually, physically, or emotionally as a result of their learning? (2) How can I best help and encourage them to develop those abilities and the habits of the heart and mind to use them? (3) How can my students and I best understand the nature, quality, and progress of their learning? And (4) How can I evaluate my efforts to foster that learning? (p. 49)
“Everybody can contribute and each contribution is unique,” Paul Baker emphasized. “I want each of my students to understand that no one else in the world will bring his or her particular set of experiences and body chemistry to the class. Everybody has something special to offer, an original perspective.” (p. 142)
If you would like to talk about something you learned from Ken Bain’s work, or any topic related to teaching, please reach out to us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu to schedule a consultation. If you have another favorite book that inspires you in your teaching, we also welcome your recommendations for spring faculty reading group selections. We look forward to working with you!