Ken Bain
1 Idealistic, inspiring guide to teaching
Ken Bain currently directs the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, so he knows what he's talking about. His study of the best teachers and what they do took more than a decade to put together and resulted in several conclusions which are helpfully stated at the beginning of this book: the best teachers, not surprisingly, know their own fields extremely well and think long and hard about how to convey that knowledge. The best teachers don't just teach facts, they teach students how to think. The best teachers respect their students and assume everyone can learn, and they constantly assess and evaluate their own efforts as well as those of their students.
It was enjoyable for me to peruse this volume and compare my own teaching to the models described therein: to nod in agreement when the they matched what I did, to think about improving or modifying my approaches when they did not. After finishing it I can't say I slavishly agree with all of Bain's conclusions or admonitions--I still believe that in my field a certain level of basic technical mastery is essential for further achievement. (And there's nothing wrong that I can see with requiring students to meet deadlines.) However, Bain's work has motivated me to strive to improve how I impart that mastery, and caused me to re-examine "truths" that I thought were self-evident. It's my guess that such soul-searching is what this volume was meant to evoke.
I also suggest reading Patrick Allitt's "I'm the Teacher, You're the Student" for an interesting and rather different perspective on teaching in higher education.
2 Best in class
Well written. Clearly articulated. Inspiring. I found myself having to read on at least two planes: Reading for understanding and reading to apply it to my classes. I gained insight and understanding that will take me years to apply. The second read was even better than the first. I recommend it highly to anyone that teaches, especially those that teach the university or college level.
3 Highly useful book!
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...
4 An Excellent Read for Those Who Value Teaching
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.
